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It’s a key question for any business trying to make their processes frictionless: how do you integrate contracts with your other systems of record? 

It’s a question many of our customers face, across lots of different systems – whether it’s Salesforce for commercial teams, Greenhouse for hiring, Workday for HR or Sage for finance. There are obvious benefits to integrating contracts with your other systems of record:

  • It’s efficient and it saves time;
  • It ensures consistent, secure storage of documents; and
  • It helps legal teams to showcase the value they can provide, through collaborative contract management.

Through working with our users to integrate with their systems, we’ve built an understanding of their priorities throughout the process. Here are five benefits you’ll find if you integrate contract management with your other business solutions.

1. Stay comfortable 🏖

Your colleagues use their systems of record every day. They know them back to front. Forcing them to learn a new system, just so they can align with your contract process, is likely to lead to friction – or worse, discontent. If they find it too onerous they might go rogue and start creating contracts outside of your contract management platform, using the old systems they’ve grown comfortable with. Instead, integrate your contract process with their systems of record, so creation and signing can be accomplished within the platform they already trust.

2. Less back and forth 🔂

Contracts govern your most important business relationships, but they’re not an end in themselves – they shouldn’t distract from a business team’s main job. For example, sales teams working in Salesforce want to spend less time worrying about managing contracts, and more time closing deals. Hiring teams should spend their time finding the right people to grow the company, without having to worry about managing contracts on the side. An integrated contract process should let people concentrate their efforts in the right place – not in document management.

3. Trust the robots 🤖

Integration between your systems of record can create transparency through automation. Rather than manually sending documents to relevant stakeholders at different points in the contract process, let your integrated systems handle the information sharing. Don’t leave the proper communication of your contracts at the whim of human error – integrate them with other systems of record to make sure the right stakeholders automatically have access to completed documents as and when they need it.

4. Get that data 📊

Synchronising data between systems of record is crucial if you’re aiming to be a genuinely data-driven business. Configuring this properly removes a whole load of risk from the process, as human error is largely mitigated, and saves you time fixing issues like duplication and incomplete records.

We see the value in this for our customers, most powerfully when contracts data live-syncs with Salesforce – once an opportunity’s effective date is updated in Salesforce, this is reflected automatically in the contract. Again, this minimises the risk of human error and keeps legal and commercial teams on the same page. From discussing with customers, we’ve learned that the best method would be to synchronise relevant data from different teams – for example, for sales contracts, linking pricing and quote lines, or employment contracts, linking start dates and employee details. Don’t leave the accuracy of such key details to chance – let your systems do the heavy lifting on your data.

5. Use low-maintenance systems 😌

Integrating any two systems together can be time-consuming. The easiest way to avoid the frustration this can bring is to choose a system that’s adaptable to various requirements, easy to configure, and easy to maintain. 

As you look to integrate contracts with systems of record, keep these points front-of-mind in your decision-making process. If you’re looking to create an integrated workflow for contract management in your business teams, just get in touch to find out how we can help.