Have you ever wondered, why Finance Contract can get tricky at times? Why is it so that finance teams in any company spends hours managing and maintaining contracts, when they get can do it all just in a click. How? Well, we will talk about all of it in this article.
But why do Finance Contract and Financial teams play such a critical role?
The Finance Team is directly responsible for the health and durability of the business by overseeing critical functions like-
- Maintaining and monitoring business transactions
- Assisting the C-Suite with strategic inputs during key projects
- Efficiently allocating resources to ensure operational fluidity
Since their operation is critical to business survival, it is important that they are adequately supported both by teams and technology to reduce process hiccups and minimize the chance of errors.
What Finance Teams Need?
- Seamless and instantaneous access to business information
- Visibility into the operations of each business team
- Instant intimation of every business transaction/contract generated
Contractual Challenges for Finance Teams and Their Solutions
Often, the key challenge for finance teams within businesses is that the workflow to proactively seek contracts generated by business teams, analyze them for valuable insights, and then integrate that information into budgeting and planning is long-drawn and disconnected.
There is also a dearth of tools that understand the administrative challenges and minimize the workload on the Finance Team by automating repetitive tasks in the process.
Here is how SpotDraft untangles the key challenges of Finance Teams with dynamic, AI-assisted technology -
Challenge #1: Complicated contract tracking/discovery
Since every business interaction is preceded by a contract, a typical business would have multiple contracts for multiple instances. An individual business team - like Sales - may generate and execute contracts on an ad-hoc basis.
For the finance team to keep track of all old and new contracts, they need to actively reach out and follow up with individual teams in a process that is both long-drawn and cumbersome.
At worst - it can also lead to loss of documentation that may directly impact revenue.
💡 Solution: With SpotDraft, every contract either generated internally or sent by an external stakeholder, can be organized in a simple and easy-to-navigate system.
The platform also supports advanced search options and finance team members can search contracts for a specific use case with custom tags or contract meta-data.
This makes tracking old or new contracts seamless and reduces the Finance Team’s dependency on their peers. Information is now instantaneously available and independently accessible.
Challenge #2: Revenue bleeding through missed payment/due dates
Every contract (internal or external) institutionalizes the due dates for payments, procurements, or the term of service between your business and the customer/stakeholder.
While missing renewal dates can directly translate to a loss of revenue from your customer, missing vendor/service payment dates or unarrested service rollovers can incur fees or surcharges. It is why actively tracking payment due dates and/or following up with vendors or customers can go a long way in maintaining a solid procurement funnel.
💡 Solution: If you are using spreadsheets to track important contract dates, you are already aware that it is an effort-intensive, administrative process that needs to be automated.
SpotDraft helps finance teams plan for expenses better while avoiding penalties or unwanted automatic deductions in case of unrestricted rollovers with automated reminders and notifications.
Set custom reminder intervals and frequency and identify new savings or revenue opportunities for your business.
Challenge #3: Lack of cross-team information visibility
Lack of visibility into the operations of your peer teams is a strong impediment to resource allocation for Finance Teams. This is usually due to a breakage in the data inventory process and is often succeeded by multiple meetings to align information and resource requirements.
💡 Solution: To make the process fluid, any data collection or storage hub must also integrate with the specific tools used by each team.
With custom API integration, all projects and their related data are automatically identified and fed into the SpotDraft platform.
For example - sales or employment agreements generated ad-hoc on either Salesforce or HR tools are not only automatically reflected in the SpotDraft repository, but key details like - deal value, tenure of payment, or the signing authority gets updated and stored in one convenient location too.
Here’s how SpotDraft’s integration with Sales teams’ staple product - Salesforce, looks like -
Challenge #4: Isolated editing process in contracts under the purview of Finance
Editing Finance Team contracts can also take a long time. In antiquated processes representatives from the Finance team might have to continually communicate with Legal teams to leave comments and suggest changes.
Once the requested changes are made, the Legal Team might send the edited document to Finance for further reviews. This is a process inefficiency that takes a lot of time to resolve itself.
💡 Solution: Within SpotDraft’s Legal Editor, comments can directly be left on the contract without compromising its integrity. All changes made are automatically highlighted in a dynamic audit trail.
This makes work much faster, avoids the creation of multiple documents for one single use-case, and reduces isolation by making editing a collaborative process.
Scoped comments on contracts can help you control the visibility of your comments to internal stakeholders only, to limit critical information from any unwarranted third parties.
Challenge #5: Generating easy-to-consume contract reports
Preparing a report that contracts the operations of the entire Finance Team into a bite-sized, easy-to-understand document can often be a challenge. This means highlighting every critical piece of information and representing them pictographically.
Generating usable information from contracts can especially be challenging because they involve going through pages of information and then categorizing valuable details into exclusive categories depending on the use-case to identify trendlines.
💡 Solution: Generating contract reports on SpotDraft takes minimal effort. Not only can contracts be clubbed into separate groups based on their use-cases, but each of these groups can also be used to create individual reports at the click of a button.
As an end-to-end contract automation platform - SpotDraft simplifies contract tasks, and enables finance, legal, sales, HR, and other business teams do more with less.
