What we found when we analyzed 10,000+ contracts

After analyzing 10,000 contracts over the past 10 years at Concord, we’ve discovered something astonishing: companies waste an average of $2.5 million per billion in revenue by failing to extract and centralize their contract data.

This is a bold claim, so let me back it up with hard numbers from our own internal data:

• Your auto-renewal clauses are costing you: 42 percent of enterprise companies unintentionally renew agreements for software they don’t use anymore.
  
• You’re leaving money on the table: 38% of contracts have volume discounts that companies fail to leverage because the Finance team doesn’t know they exist.
  
• Your forecasting is fiction: Actual contract commitments deviate from financial forecasts by an average of 31 percent when contract data isn’t centralized.

Convinced yet? We were shocked, too. But the reality we’ve discovered is that contracts only deliver value when they’re treated as sources of real-time financial data.

In other words, contract data can reveal exactly where and when money flows into and out of your organization — and where and when it’s about to. But if you don’t centralize, organize and tap into the data in your agreements, you’re leaving money on the table (or flushing it down the toilet).

That’s because 76 percent of companies store their contracts in disconnected systems, and think of them as separate files. Sales uses one tool, Legal uses another, Finance yet another, and so on.

When our customers make the mental shift to thinking of contract data as an asset in itself, we see them realize massive savings. They gain access to exciting revenue opportunities, too.

In short, the winners are companies that treat their contract data as an operational asset, and take steps to centralize it and make it searchable on a holistic basis. This repository of contract intel enables decision makers to base their forecasts on actual current commitments and dollar amounts, rather than on memory and gut instinct.

The future belongs to companies that think this way. Do you?