It's hard to imagine doing business without agreements, contracts and other documents that govern the rules under which we provide our services. Form of doing business and its scale very often forces us to manage more and larger archives of documents, that you take care and keep it throughout the period of the provision of services, and even after their completion. If small businesses somehow cope with this problem, the scale of operations of large companies already unfortunately feels the effects of the lack of tools and management philosophy.
By writing this blog I would like to shed light on this issue, which, as it turns out, very quickly leads to chaos and unpleasant surprises, which is the company. How to defend? What opportunities and benefits are from centralized management of agreements and documents in Baseline DMS and Contracts module?
Contracts creator
Let’s start with the place to ask: “whether the agreement that we sign with our customers are repetitive?”. That is, whether it can be assumed that each contract consists of a fixed part (called template) and fields variables such as counterparty data, range of services and the amounts, terms of payment? If so, why not take advantage of. generators of contracts, that speed up and organize the process of initializing the agreement and allow you to eliminate human errors that in the normal case, are often detected only after signing of the contract. Generator contracts is a tool built into the Baseline system ™ and allows you to create electronic templates for different types of agreements, annexes or protocols. If you want to create a contract, the user simply selects its type, indicates the template and complements. the field variables on the electronic form in the system. After you save the form is generated, the first version of the agreement, which let’s right-can still be edited by the user until it does not consider that the work on the contract are currently completed and it is time to send the contract to your supervisor. It is important also that the numbering of the agreements can fully manage the system, by which we will avoid duplicate versions of documents.
Contract management process
The Baseline™ Contracts module has been designed to advance the process. All this, so you do not have to send the document by e-mail, or worse, print and submit paper copy on the desk supervisor. Everything is done on the basis of the so-called action on document.
It is worth here noted that the same process can be engage legal department, which shall deliver an opinion on our agreement, whenever necessary. You can also enter a stage of assessment of the agreement by the client. As long as this will not probably have access to our system, so we can it the agreement send electronically and apply to return system response.
Designing the process of circulation of the contract must be assumed, that it should be up to flexible without blocking users from the transfer document to the appropriate person, regardless of the quantity carried out an iteration.
Contracts versioning
Assume that we cannot for some reason use the generator contracts, and editing of the document must be implemented using MS Word. How do you ensure consistency of each document of the contract and keep the story of his records, while the contract often circulates between different people including your client?
Well, the Baseline™ is able to version contracts files using native MS Office add-on. You, if you want to make changes to the document simply blocking it in the system and edits in your MS Word. Since that time, no one else can retrieve this document for editing, because the document is in locked state. When you have finished editing the document and application of all comments and observations, the user saves the document back to the Baseline system ™ by using the built-in menu editor MS Word MS Office. System “conquers” again, the version number of the file and releases the lock through which other users can perform exactly the same operation and apply your comments. This approach protects us from popular overwriting itself changes and gives you the ability to look for any version of the agreement.
Baseline™ has another unique feature – well, it allows you to use a plug-in DAC (Document Access Control) to preview of the edited version of the contract directly from a Web browser without having to save the file to disk and have a license for MS Office. The plugin also allows you to protect files against leakage outside the structure of the organization. By marking the file as particularly sensitive, the trademarked term from the same print or theft by dishonest employee. In this situation, it is possible to view the document only in read-only mode and printed with a watermark on each page of the document.
Signing contracts online
When we talk about signing a contract, we associate it with printing a document, sending it by mail, and all the confusion about processing and scanning. Well, no – with our tool, you can sign contracts online in literally 5 minutes without having to print, send or scan your paper. The advantage of this solution is not only convenience and speed, but also security for the document itself, which is physically in one place all the time. To sign the contract, we use our add-in implementing integration with the Autenti platform. After signing the contract, it is automatically entered in the contract register, which you can read about in the next paragraph.
Registry of signed contracts
The process of circulation of the contract should assume at the appropriate stage of the print-ready document and its shipment to the customer. As a consequence of the process, after you send the contract, will wait for its return in the paper version. The right person (typically an employee of Administration) will be responsible for scanning the signed contract on both sides and transfer feedback to the owner. A registry of contracts has another unique feature – OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Each agreement is scanned automatically ocr-health activities in the system by which users can search for agreements using the phrase in the text. Full-text search mechanism looks up the entire registry and searches for matching documents, to which the user has the appropriate permissions.
Register of agreements covers not only the sales agreement. Usually it the role of a global repository of all agreements, including agreements with employees, contractors, suppliers or customers. Access to the registry is protected by the right set of access rights to each department or guardian have access only to the documents for which it is responsible. Itself the registry may in practice operate independently, in isolation from the process of creating a contract. Then we have to deal with the classic system of DMS.