Contract approval workflow

Businesses require to mitigate any risk in their agreements with clients and suppliers. So, every business agreement should be finalized with a contract, duly authorized one. The contract review and approval process usually touches numeros departments and can be a complicated and time-consuming task. When welcoming a work-from-home option, it becomes vital to ensure that contracts are reviewed and approved in time.

Contract Approval Challenges

When a new contract is created, or an existing one is modified, it moves through the contract approval process including review by the legal department, CFO or delegee, President, and more people, and frequently meets several most common bottlenecks on its way. First of all, paperwork and manual follow-up are bogging down staff. In this situation, when contract metadata or approver’s comment is missing, it requires back and forth communication to get all required information. Even more, managers turn to have no high-level view and are unable to check where contract approval requests are in the process, how many requests were submitted and where roadblocks may be occurring. Eventually, it generates risk of loss due to late approval for a contract that needs prompt handling in order to support vital business operations or, in the case of sales, to win a new deal. Obviously, it is necessary to make sure that all the tasks involved in submitting, reviewing, collaborating on and approving are performed in a highly-predictable manner and the contract approval process flow is easy to track.

How to Improve Contract Approval Process

Majority companies start from creating the Contract Authorization Policy, which designates the employees who have been delegated the authority to review, approve and sign contracts that are binding on the company. In addition to the Policy it will be useful to create clear instructions regarding the way of contract processing. These instructions should include the happy path of the approval process for the majority of contracts, from contract creation to final contract authorization and sending for execution. In addition to the happy path, it is also necessary to describe the most common workflow alternatives for specific types of contracts, categories of contractors, or whatever attribute that could influence on a number of stakeholders and contract approval process flow.

Sometimes a contract approval workflow may be complicated and include numerous forks for various workflow scenarios for specific business cases. If so, a paperless contract approval process helps a lot with ensuring contract compliance and timely approval. Once a contract is manually submitted for approval via form or email or received from electronic signature service via API, workflow software automatically defines contract type and sends it to appropriate authorized approvers. Every employee involved in the process gets notification about new contract review and approval task and approaching due date. Even more, you can set up the contract form so that every employee could edit only specific fields, relevant for their role and position. Such an approach allows creating new contracts using pre-approved contract templates and eliminates approval by the legal department for every single contract. The benefits of an electronic contract approval process may include faster contract approval cycle, reduced human error, and on-demand reports.

Contract Approval Workflow Template

CMW Lab offers easy and powerful workflow automation software with the ready-to-use template of contract approval process and customizable approval request form. Use this contract approval process example for quick start and adjust both workflow and form according to your business needs with drag and drop simplicity. Besides, you can easily integrate your contract approval workflow with your ERP, CRM or other system and ensure smooth information exchange for proper contract execution and archiving.

Contract approval process template

Fully adjustable contract approval request form