To create the necessary buy-in among your business’s leaders and functional partners, you need to shatter the assumption that contracts—and the benefits of implementing software to manage them—only affect an administrative role or department.

So let’s walk through how just a few key departments of an organization directly or indirectly benefit from contract management software.

• Finance
  With contracts centralized in one place, finance personnel can maintain visibility in all contracts, even those originated by other departments. Increased control can yield dramatic cost savings, especially when combined with features such as alerts and reminders, by reducing unnecessary duplication of services, overpaying, missed deadlines and deliverables, unwanted auto-renewals, and more.
• Human Resources
  Employment contracts can be easily managed through their entire lifecycle, as well as identifying renegotiation opportunities and reducing risk of non-compliance or litigation. HR departments usually need to store a lot sensitive and disparate information on employees; using a contract management system as a database, important records can be linked to or stored with associated records. This can greatly reduce the organizational mess generated from all the records (paper and otherwise) that HR departments amass.
• Purchasing
  A purchasing department must maintain exact control over purchasing contracts to maximize its effectiveness. Contract management software is the ideal tool to ensure necessary transparency to mitigate risk and increase productivity during renegotiation periods. Purchasing departments can look up contracts to ensure invoices comply with agreed upon rates and charges. Also, notation fields can be used to store a history of such reviews – which makes it more likely to catch anomalies in subsequent reviews.
• Information Technology
  One of the biggest headaches for IT departments can be minding the constant maintenance needed for homegrown solutions used for tracking internal company data. Even some “off-the-shelf” applications may get used as databases, though they weren’t designed for that. The result is a lot of work being done by IT departments that take away from more vital work. A solution like Contract Assistant is easy to install and can be managed by any user with consumer-level knowledge of software. A strong history of excellent support (see Contact Assistant customer comments here) also means users will rarely, if ever, have to rely on internal IT for help.

These are just a few examples of how different departments can benefit from contact management software. No matter who benefits, the point is that centralized contract management is a best practice for a broad range of users and departments.