ContractZen Review: Contract Management and Digital Governance Made Easy

Considering the ever-growing competition between companies, it’s easy to see the immense pressure corporate executives face – particularly when it comes to contract management and digital governance.

Many times, this can lead to a loss of productivity or the mishandling of important data. This typically happens when important company documents aren’t stored in centralized locations and company decision-makers (such as C-level executives and the board) don’t have access to the information and documents they need when they need them.

Companies need a digital governance solution that’s equipped to match corporate file management and offers tools that enable users to securely store and share critical business documents in a safe, centralized location.

In this post, we’ll take a look at how ContractZen enables C-level executives as well as board members to improve contract management and store important business documents in a secure and efficient way.

What Is ContractZen?

Founded in 2014, ContractZen is a B2B cloud service that offers an all-in-one digital hub for corporate governance.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the features on offer with ContractZen:

• Contract management. It lets you upload, store, and manage contracts from a centralized location.
• Meeting management. You can easily schedule meetings, discuss the meeting agenda, and digitally manage the entire meeting process.
• Datarooms. It offers secure, virtual datarooms for audit situations where users can share documents with clients or other people outside the organization e.g. for financial and tax audits.
• E-Signatures. Lets you get documents signed quickly and securely via integrated e-signature solutions.

Streamline Contract Management Within the Organization

When it comes to legal matters, the control versus speed dilemma is greatly aggravated by the lack of visibility into contracts. Think of it this way: if you’re unable to access important company documents, you’ll have less control over situations like mergers and acquisitions.

This is a serious concern because contracts include the terms of the value exchanged so, if you can’t ensure the correct value for agreements, your company may be losing out on a lot of money.

For starters, better visibility into contracts enables you to prevent expiring contracts and stay on top of renewals. Different departments of a company work together to make sure that all the necessary steps are followed in the contract management process.

Managing contracts becomes even more complex if you consider other factors such as multiple office locations, languages, and time zones. In addition to this, managing contracts manually can lead to human error, a hold-up in contract cycles, and limited control over the contract process.

This is why it’s vital for a company to be able to centrally control and track changes in real-time. By automating contract management activities, companies can prevent information silos from forming, improve control, and significantly reduce contract creation time.

ContractZen’s drag-and-drop tool allows you to quickly import multiple files (including existing documents) into the cloud-based solution all at once. It also lets you email documents which make things incredibly easy for companies that operate remotely, have branches in multiple locations, or receive emails with attachments that need to be imported directly into a contract management platform.

With ContractZen, you can set automated email reminders to contracts informing team members of important upcoming dates. It comes with a built-in metadata tagging system that creates dynamic folders allowing you to quickly search for and access your contracts.

ContractZen’s metadata-based storage implementation enables you to organize documents on the basis of the type of information they contain.

You’ll be able to use contract visual tagging to set metadata and quickly locate the contract you’re searching for. For instance, if you store different types of contracts – such as licenses, NDA, and rentals – you can create a separate tag for each of them.

A metadata-driven document organization also helps you easily access all connected documents, not just contracts. Once your documents are organized by metadata tags, you can connect related documents together in multiple ways.

As a result, your team members won’t have to come up with a way to logically organize documents. It’s also worth mentioning that, with ContractZen, users can post comments on files and talk to each other about different documents as opposed to sifting through dozens of email threads.

Leverage an All-Digital, Modern Meeting Portal

ContractZen lets you digitally manage sales calls, board meetings, and executive meetings which increases work productivity. This is helpful for all types of corporate meeting scenarios whether it’s an annual shareholders meeting or a simple product demo.

Its meeting portal gives you access to a fully digital meeting process that takes care of everything from scheduling the meeting to signing contracts and documents. You’ll be able to quickly create meeting agendas and meeting minutes. ContractZen also comes with a review tool that lets you collect attendee feedback.

In addition to this, it features a powerful, built-in meeting scheduler that takes care of finding suitable slots for scheduling meetings. This way, you won’t need to use a separate tool for scheduling corporate meetings. It also lets you send meeting invitations in a single click and automate email reminders.

ContractZen enables you to create, prioritize, and follow up on tasks and obligations after they’ve been agreed on during meetings. You can easily share the meeting agenda and other materials with your team members in a secure manner. 

Here are some of the main benefits of a fully digital meeting platform for C-level executives and board members:

1. Easily find and schedule a meeting time that suits all stakeholders
2. Enable the board to have internal discussions
3. Share meeting agenda and materials in a secure way
4. Offers tools that makes board members’ work easier (like MeetingBook with personal comment and annotation tools)
5. Take meeting minutes directly within the portal
6. Effortlessly organize the comment round for the minutes of the meetings draft
7. Easily monitor tasks agreed on during the meetings
8. Efficient and all-inclusive search capabilities

Using ContractZen, C-level executives and board members can easily mark the issues discussed with keywords (tags) helping users track the decision-making process in retrospect.

Get Documents Signed Quickly With Electronic Signatures

Here are some of the reasons why it’s important for C-level executives to get documents signed electronically:

• It’s easier, faster, and safer. Clients will be able to electronically sign documents thereby improving the buying experience, helping you sell more. A fully-digital signing system also helps management or board members sign meeting minutes quickly and in a secure way.
• Close deals faster. Signing electronically allows you to finalize deals without giving a second chance to your competitors. In other words, once a deal is signed, you can rest assured that you’ve secured the sale.
• It can be done on the go. Signing digitally means you can use your phone or tablet instead of pen and paper. So, even if your client doesn’t have the time to print and sign, they’ll still be able to sign on a mobile device.

ContractZen lets you connect your e-signature system to your contract management hub. This way, you’ll be able to easily send documents for signing and track their progress from the moment they’re sent to when they get signed and stored in your account.

It integrates with several e-signature services, namely Assently, DocuSign, SignHere, and Adobe Sign. In addition to this, ContractZen’s virtual data rooms, financial administration, board portal, and meeting management features also support the e-signature integrations.

ContractZen offers a full-text search with OCR capabilities. When a document is uploaded to ContractZen, it’s transformed into text-based, searchable information. As a result, you’ll be able to simply search for what you’re looking for instead of going through the entire document. The metadata tagging system for signing and managing documents also works in the same way.

Pricing

You can get started with ContractZen at an affordable price of $9.50 per user per month (billed annually) which includes:

• Contract management
• Meeting management
• Financial and administrative documents
• Company register
• Virtual data room
• eSignature
• 50 GB storage space
• Unlimited number of contracts

 

ContractZen also offers a 30-day free trial to all customers. And, if you have more than 50 users on the team, you can request a quote. The company also offers discounts for eligible non-profits.

Conclusion

ContractZen can help C-level executives and board members improve contract management workflows and share and store critical documents in a secure way. It comes with useful features like e-signing, fully-digital meeting management, contract management, and automated email reminders.

 

What features do you look for in a contract management tool? Let us know by commenting below.