Recording your contracts

Recording the information about contracts, or registering contracts or entering the contract data.. or however you want to call it… is the biggest drawback of using a Contract Management solution.

Why? Because it seems simple for the application developer (sure.. i’ll just allow the user to fill in this form.. and… Bazinga! the contract is registered in the solution). But is nothing like that for the user.

I would argue that if the user is already disciplined enough to record information about contracts or to record any kind of information in a register of sorts… then there is a big chance they already manage their contracts quite well.. and don’t need a contract management solution.

So let’s spend some time and drill into what makes this so ugly for the user, and what can some software do to help there.

First, if it’s not your day job to record information into a computer.. then probably you don’t want to do this without understanding (truly understanding) what you get in return.

Now.. what do you get in return of filling in a form to describe your newly identified contract? Peace of mind? That would be a cool trick to pull from a software.. Or maybe you get a sense of accomplishment.

It all also depends on the type of information you may want to record. Sometimes you just want to make a note about a contract (maybe it’s a ”draft” now) and will fill in more information later. Sometimes you have already 10+ documents (files) for that contract which you want to register in 1-go (as opposed to recording each and every document one by one).

A contract management software needs to let you do all of that, at least. And reinforce the sentiment of “I’m doing the right thing” everytime you do such data entry. And the reason why is mostly because if you, as the user, don’t feel you’re getting something good out of doing this… you will stop doing it.. which will then have you miss all the future advantages.

After all, this data entry is necessary in order to provide future value (and this is the actual problem, as that value is not very apparent when you record the data). The future value is composed of things like notifications, data accessibility, reports, analytics, statistics, collaboration, compliance…

Smart contract management software may go a step further: will automatically fill in some data for you. For example, when you upload a file, it may already suggest the document type, some key data (such as document date, partner names etc.)… making it even easier for you to record it.

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