The Ultimate Guide to Using a Contract Management Dashboard

Managing a contract portfolio can be overwhelming, especially when dealing with large contract volumes containing complex terms and clauses. Many organizations face challenges like:

Do these challenges sound familiar to you? If yes, lack of contract visibility is likely hindering your contracting efficiency. So, how can you address these challenges?

The answer is simple—you can set up a digital dashboard to manage your contracts. As per a report by World Contracting and Commerce, over 54% of businesses have adopted or are in the process of setting up their contract reporting dashboard.

This blog offers comprehensive information on contract management dashboards—what they are, why they are beneficial, and, most importantly, how to set up your dashboard. Let’s get started.

What is a contract management dashboard?

A contract management dashboard is a centralized tool to compile, visualize, and present an organization’s contracts. These dashboards are loaded with charts, graphs, and tables representing contract lifecycle performance.

A dashboard breaks down complex contract data into digestible information that the leadership, legal professionals, and other key stakeholders can use to make informed decisions.

The impact? All teams have easy, real-time access to contract status and progress–ensuring streamlined contract lifecycle management. This makes dashboards superior to traditional contract management tools like Excel, which relies on manual data updation.

Now that you understand what dashboards are, let’s discuss how they work and present data. The coming section covers this topic.

What does a contract management dashboard look like?

A contract management dashboard presents all the key information at a glance—contract status, upcoming renewals, expirations, contract values, and beyond. All this information is visualized through an intuitive interface using pie charts, line graphs, and bar graphs.

Here’s an example of HyperStart’s contract tracking dashboard to give you an idea of what a contract management dashboard looks like:

But here’s the catch—contract dashboards are customizable.

You can design your dashboard to represent metrics and information valuable to your organization. As a result, the entire dashboard can be customized depending on how you want to manage your contract portfolio.

Other dashboard types include Kanban boards and Excel-based dashboards. However, these are rarely used due to their inefficiency and limited features in tracking and reporting contracts.

HyperStart CLM offers two dedicated dashboards: one to track pre-signature contracts (In-flight Dashboard) and another to track signed and executed contracts (Tracking Dashboard). You can create custom, team-specific dashboards for sales, legal, finance, and procurement—giving each team a complete overview of its contracts.

After understanding what dashboards are and what they look like, it’s important to explore their benefits and understand why implementing a dashboard is a worthwhile investment in contract management.

Why use a contract management dashboard

Central dashboards enable stakeholders to access all vital contract data in one place, thus improving collaborativeness in contract management. Here are the benefits of using a contract management dashboard for your contract management processes:

1. Promotes accountability and visibility

A central contract management dashboard gives cross-functional teams clear visibility over the organization’s contract portfolio. Dashboards offering customized views help finance, procurement, operations, and sales teams quickly analyze contracts relevant to their operations.

This centralized view over contracts promotes accountability where multiple teams have ready access to relevant contractual obligations and commitments. Additionally, CLM dashboard features like version control and trail ensure agreements are not tempered—further strengthening security.

2. Eliminates data silos in contracting processes

With legal teams handling most aspects of the contracting process, there are chances of critical contract data ending up in silos. In such situations, operational and administrative teams cannot track contracts’ progress, leading to miscommunications.

Using dashboards helps the organization share information centrally. A contract management software like HyperStart CLM can be connected to accounting, sales, HR, procurement, and other apps. This integration provides all teams with a central dashboard for contractual insights and eliminates knowledge silos.

3. Simplifies KPI tracking and performance management

Contractual KPIs are key metrics that help evaluate contract performance and streamline CLM strategies. However, tracking contract KPIs can be challenging when contracts are scattered across multiple storage mediums like drive folders, local disks, emails, and filing cabinets.

Dashboards bring all contracts to one place, making it easy for analyst teams to track contract management KPIs. From calculating contract TAT to analyzing pre-signed contracts and getting real-time insights, every metric can be tracked easily through a dashboard.

4. Offers real-time reporting and insights

When tracking key performance indicators in contracts, most legal teams are prone to analyzing outdated data. Since most organizations analyze contracts periodically, there are chances of using outdated information when analyzing agreements.

Digital contact management dashboards connect data directly with the contract document. This connection synchronizes the dashboard’s data with contracts, meaning that it reflects the latest information in real time.

Moreover, smart dashboards like HyperStart CLM provide interactive, visualized contract reports, enabling you to monitor contract performance in real time.

Using a dashboard to manage contracts is superior, efficient, and more reliable than traditional approaches like using spreadsheets. But the question is, “How do we build a contract dashboard?” Let’s find out in the coming section.

How to set up a contract management dashboard

Setting up your dashboard for contract management is a straightforward path. All you have to do is upload your contract portfolio into a contract management system like HyperStart CLM. These tools will help you automatically generate a full-fledged dashboard in minutes, thanks to AI-powered contract analysis technology.

The contract management dashboard software will analyze your agreement portfolio, extract data from it, and present a visualized, interactive dashboard. Once visualized, your contract data is ready for analysis.

Not just that, you can also create a dashboard for your pre-signature contacts. HyperStart CLM offers this solution in its in-flight analytics dashboard, which uses AI technology to identify contracting bottlenecks and delayed approvals. Such dashboards help accelerate workflows and get to a yes faster.

After setting up your dashboard, you can play around and get detailed insights on your contracts. Contract management dashboard software offers features like real-time insights and analytics to manage complex agreement portfolios easily. Let’s take a look at these features.

Essential features of a contract dashboard

It is important to ensure that your contract dashboard has the needed features and functionalities for optimal efficiency. Here are the key features of contract dashboard software:

These features help manage contracts easily and improve contract turnaround time. In case you are looking for contract management and tracking software that offers all these features, choose HyperStart CLM.

Manage all contracts centrally with HyperStart CLM

Central dashboards are effective systems for handling contracts. These tools help store and track all contract-related information centrally, giving instant visibility to business teams over contractual data.

HyperStart CLM’s contract management dashboard helps business teams gain maximum contract value and efficiency. Built using 99% accurate contracting AI tech, this platform is a single-stop solution for creating, reviewing, redlining, approving, storing, tracking, and analyzing contracts.

Here’s what sets HyperStart CLM’s contact management dashboard apart:

With HyperStart CLM, all business teams—sales, legal, finance, procurement, and operations—can stay connected and manage contracts on a single, unified dashboard. Want to know more? Book a demo with our team and discover how HyperStart CLM can simplify your contracting processes. Start with a 14-day free, no-obligation trial today.