World Magazine 2024
Running a company is a challenging and stressful endeavor even if things seem to go smooth and the money is coming your way. The sheer amount of features a single business has can be overwhelming especially for new owners who have just set up things for the first time and entered the market. Having your own customers and caring for their needs is crucial, but management and paperwork cannot be overlooked either since those more hidden and boring elements are of equal importance for a quality company.
One of the things companies usually struggle with is the management of contracts. There is no revenue if you do not have customers, and contracts ensure that. Moreover, you will have to build relationships with other companies and collaborate with them. These contracts are also important if you mean to have a long-lasting presence on the market and a successful company in your hands.
If you are having issues with this sort of managerial work, do not worry. You are not alone and we are here to help you. This article will serve as a guide on what mistakes your company might be making in terms of managing contracts and how best to avoid them, or solve them. Make sure to read through the article carefully and definitely check out ContractSafe for more information on the subject.
Table of Contents
1. Not Using Templates
Templates exist for all sorts of different uses and they can be implemented in various types of managerial work. They are premade to help you better organize things and fill in the information quicker without having to do organizational work for every single contract. The best types of templates are those you can change and adapt to exactly what you need. For contracts templates, you can check weareindy.com. These custom models allow you full control so that you can have more than one choice depending on the type of contract you are dealing with. Different formats, fonts, styles, text size, and editing are all possible but only if you find the right template. There is special software out there that can help you as well as dedicated apps for specific types of templates meant for companies in different branches. You will never again have to spend time formatting pages and pages of one and the same text, only the relevant part that makes the contracts different.
2. Using Shared Drives for Storing
Storing your company’s valuable data and information is necessary for a wide range of reasons. Such information is proof that you are doing legitimate work, as well as a clear indication of what both sides who signed the contract have to do for each other. Breaches of contracts cannot be evaluated and looked into if you do not have a safe space to store them. Therefore, the drives you use must be dedicated only to the contracts and nothing else. Many companies tend to use shared drives, and more of them, to store and track documents related to all of their contracts. Then when somebody needs the latest and the most revised version, they have trouble finding it. The worst scenario is when nobody has control of the drives and they just change hands from employee to employee.
The right type and amount of access and security have to exist and only those who have use of them should be able to have them close by. To increase productivity and limit the time your workers take to find and check something, have a contract-only drive that will have its own place within the office.
3. Manual Work in the 21st Century
Perhaps the worst thing a company can do with their contract management is doing things by hand the old-fashioned way. If you have a contract manager who still uses post-it notes, physical calendars, and who spends most of their office hours with papers and pens in hand, know that you can be doing so much better than this. With a special contract management software or a whole system for your company that will have such a feature as a part of its tools, contracts will be managed automatically and everything will run more smoothly, quickly, and optimally.
Missing deadlines conflicted meetings, and all sorts of actions that need to be taken for the contracts you have to stay as they should are harder to deal with manually. Use technology to stay relevant and keep up in this fast-changing world or the competition will surely run you over and take away your customer base.
4. Failing to Update Them
Contracts often change over time with the increased or different needs of either of the two sides. Sometimes, both of them revisit the contract since they realize it is no longer working for them now that other factors have appeared. If your operations change in any way and you notice that something needs to change, start from the basic, obligatory things you have to do and think about how you can get a better deal. It may be now necessary to order more parts for a certain product because you are selling more of them, or you may not need as many of the others because the new product you introduced is more popular. In any case, you should revisit the deal, check when it is due to expire, and change it so that it benefits the new circumstances.
If you keep things as they are, you will not be doing the most and your company may drag along instead of expanding. One of the problems that tend to cause this has to deal with auto-renew contracts. As their name suggests, they automatically renew after they end and you are stuck with them for another year. Revisit them and make sure to monitor them frequently.
5. Relying Too Much on Old Contracts
Refusing to move on from a seemingly outdated practice is what causes many businesses to slowly become unprofitable and eventually close down. It is of no use to stick with something or someone if you notice that things are going down and that they could be better if you change the supplier or the partner. If an old contract is keeping you from going forward, you should not rely on it anymore and break it as soon as you can. You can always find something new and there is a good chance that it will work better for you simply because it is new and modern.
