5 Contract Management Challenges and How to Resolve Them

Contract management: the struggle is real

As someone on the front lines, you know all too well that contract management is an essential, but often frustrating, aspect of your business relationships. The contract management lifecycle is fraught with potential risks, bottlenecks, and missed opportunities. 

With critical deadlines, compliance risks, and scattered contract versions, it often feels like you’re juggling too many moving parts. Every missed deadline or overlooked contract term puts your company’s financial health and compliance at risk.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. By tackling these challenges head-on, you can regain control over your contract processes and safeguard your company from costly errors and inefficiencies.

Let’s dive into some common contract management challenges and explore how Agreement Intelligence, powered by AI, offers solutions that can blend seamlessly with your existing processes and bring clarity to your workload.

What is contract management?

Contract management is the set of processes and practices that your company uses to receive, review, approve, and organize all your legal documents. 

Within these set processes, numerous challenges and obstacles can arise, making it harder for you to complete them in a timely manner. Let’s talk about the typical contract management stages, some common challenges, and how Agreement Intelligence can help.

Visibility

Visibility refers to how easy it is for anyone in your organization to be able to find business critical documents quickly, easily, and securely.

Challenge:

One of the most frustrating issues is simply locating the right document at the right time. Contracts stored across various systems — or worse, in disorganized folders — make it difficult to access key information when you need it most. This lack of visibility can cause delays, compliance risks, and missed opportunities that no finance team wants to face.

Solution:

A centralized contract lifecycle management (CLM) system provides an organized, searchable database where all your contracts live. With metadata extraction, you can tag contracts by relevant data points — like dates, names, or services — making them easily accessible when you need them. For example:

• A vendor calls you to ask about the fulfillment dates in their most recent agreement.
• You go into your CLM system, type in the vendor’s name, and instantly see a list of all your contracts with them.
• You can filter your search results by fulfillment dates, as well as other lifecycle details like contract duration, dollar amount, and more.
• All the information you need is right at your fingertips. No need to navigate a complicated folder structure, then scroll through each contract to extract the information you need.

Drafting

Drafting is the process of creating a contract from scratch, usually with pre-made templates and clauses. 

Challenge:

Drafting contracts can feel like a chaotic process, especially when your team uses inconsistent templates stored in multiple locations. This not only wastes time but opens the door to errors that could delay contracts and expose your company to unnecessary risks.

Solution:

Instead of wasting hours searching for the right contract clauses, you can streamline the drafting process by using a clause library within your CLM software. This allows you to draft completely new contracts using your text editor, while easily pulling in pre-approved clauses to ensure consistency and accuracy. Outdated clauses can be swiftly removed or updated, keeping your documents organized and compliant.

Compliance

Challenge:

Compliance goes beyond just following the rules — it’s about making sure your company adheres to contract terms, industry-specific regulations, and internal company policies.

When it comes to compliance, financial teams can’t afford to take risks. Whether it’s meeting obligations outlined in your contracts, complying with state, national, and international laws, or aligning with company protocols, any significant errors can result from a wide range of issues, such as:

No tracked changes

Without knowing who made edits, it’s hard to follow up or assign accountability.

Missed deadlines

Manually tracking dates increases the chance of missing obligations, leading to legal risks.

Outdated versions

Using an incorrect contract version can lead to legal issues, if you’ve got an outdated understanding of your obligations.

Solution:

A CLM platform powered by Agreement Intelligence keeps you on top of compliance by tracking every change, so you never miss an edit that could impact your obligations. It gives you automatic deadline alerts, so you’re not scrambling at the last minute. Plus, you can quickly compare contract versions to spot critical changes, helping you renegotiate or adjust processes to stay on track and within scope.

Tracked changes

Tracked changes, or redlines, are edits or comments in a document that show who made the change and when.

Challenge:

Have you ever felt like Sherlock Holmes, hunting for clues and chasing down suspects, trying to figure out who made changes to a contract and why? Without clear visibility into document edits, collaboration bottlenecks can delay important deals, causing frustration for everyone involved. 

Solution:

A CLM with Agreement Intelligence enables you to track contract edits and changes in real time, showing exactly who made edits and when. This level of transparency ensures that all modifications made by any authorized user on your team or the signer’s team are visible and properly documented, This keeps everyone aligned throughout the review process. By keeping track of every change, you can confidently manage contract revisions without any surprises.

Extracting data

Extracting key data is the process of using management software to pull important information from your documents to aid in your contract management and help you gain valuable insights into important contract dates and obligations.

Challenge:

Extracting important information from dozens of contracts manually isn’t just tedious — it’s prone to human error. Whether you’re hunting for payment dates, vendor obligations, or renewal clauses, the time spent on manual data entry can significantly slow down your operations, pulling focus away from higher-priority tasks.

Solution:

By leveraging Agreement Intelligence, contract management software can extract pertinent data from your documents in seconds. That means all the data in your contracts becomes available to inform deadline notifications, reporting, analytics, and search results within the platform. For example:

• Need to know all your important payment dates for the next quarter? An automated email with that info is waiting in your email inbox, in a contract deadline reminder email.
• Want to check vendor obligations across multiple contracts? You can pull that info up instantly in your search results.
• Looking for upcoming renewals? They’re right at your fingertips, with contract analytics.

Turning contract challenges into opportunities

Contract management may feel like a minefield, but with the right tools, you can turn these challenges into opportunities for efficiency and control. By implementing a CLM with Agreement Intelligence, you empower your financial team members to work smarter, not harder, giving you the visibility, compliance, and organization you need to manage important agreements seamlessly.

Tackle contract management challenges with Concord’s all-in-one solution.

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