How to Improve Your Contract Repository Management 

A contract repository is a centralized location to store and manage all your agreements. Once you establish a repository, you and your team can rely on it as a definitive source for your vendor, partner, and customer contracts.

By establishing a cloud-based contract repository, you can:

• Streamline contract creation
• Quickly search through existing agreements
• Simplify auditing processes
• Reduce admin work
• Improve collaboration across your enterprise

From here, there are a few things you’ll want to do next to truly champion your contract repository strategy. Here are our top 7 strategies to get you going:

1. Prioritize Staff Training

The first step in improving your contract repository management is making sure your team knows how to use the software.

Once the repository is set up within your tech stack, schedule trainings that give managers the opportunity to get comfortable with the technology and ask questions as they go. Make sure they know:

• The software’s basic functionality
• How they can use it to collaborate with other users
• How to use the repository’s analytics to improve vendor and customer management

Once managers have a good handle on how to use the repository, organize additional training for their specific teams and set any necessary permission limits.

2. Connect Your Existing Systems

Don’t simply add a new solution to your tech landscape and continue bouncing between systems to access the documents you need.

Integrate your contract repository with your existing tech stack. This ensures all contracts from your ERP, CRM, P2P, and other systems are stored and managed in a single trustworthy location.

3. Gain a Strategic Edge with AI

While setting up a cloud-based database is a good start, artificial intelligence elevates your contract repository management strategy and empowers the entire contract lifecycle process.

AI-powered contract lifecycle management platforms:

• Automatically extract key data points
• Learn and support preferred contract structure and language
• Recognize customized fields
• Fundamentally transform contract setup, signature, and management
• Alert you to problematic terms or language and suggest revisions

4. Draft Standard Templates

It’s no secret that legal teams spend a big chunk of their time drafting new contracts for deals made throughout the organization.

Set up standard templates with approved language in your contract repository so you can speed up contract authoring and negotiation. Once resolved, you can free up more time to focus on contract strategy and other tactical business goals.

5. Manage Permissions

You may be wary about adding all your contracts into one place where anyone can access them. However, there’s an easy fix for that fear.

Make permission controls a checklist item within your contract management strategy. Set limits on who has access to specific documents—either by teams or individual users. This way, you get a clear audit trail of who has viewed or made changes to a document, avoiding accidental edits and security breaches.

6. Leverage Search Features

Say ‘goodbye” to manually scrolling through documents or using the tedious Control+F shortcut.

Use your contract repository’s advanced search capabilities to quickly gain a holistic view of full text, metadata, and specific clauses within your contract portfolio. Not only does this save you time, but you can also leverage the search results to reduce contract risk.

7. Analyze Your Data Regularly

At this point, you’ve gathered and connected your contracts, improved contract setup and search, and managed the permissions. Now, there’s one thing left to do. Make that data digestible.

Establish dashboards to find, track, and manage missing elements and incorrect language within your agreements. Once the dashboards are set up, continuously review your insights to improve contract risk strategy over time.

Remember: Data from one contract informs another, so use the holistic view your repository analytics provide to transform your overall business operations.