What is Digital Contracting
What is digital contracting?
Digital contracting encompasses the entire lifecycle of contracts—from creation, negotiation, and approval to signing, storage, and tracking—supporting all types of contracts from sales to procurement to marketing to HR. Learn about digital contract management to explore how this shift eliminates traditional bottlenecks.
How did digital contracting emerge?
Enterprises both small and large have experienced digital transformation over the past couple of decades. Sales adopted CRM, Procurement moved to cloud ERP, and teams began using tools like Slack, Zoom, and collaborative software. In the process, contracts needed to catch up. They remained slow, fragmented, and difficult to navigate—creating friction for every business touchpoint. This was primarily because of contracts.
Are unsearchable, fragmented, and unnavigable
Vary across industries and departments
Call for collaboration among multiple stakeholders
Need help understanding by both humans and computers
CLMs have been around since the early years of digital transformation but consistently fell short. While they addressed issues around traditional contracting, they didn’t address the core problems of contract lifecycle management.
The problems with analog CLMs
Slow to implement
Disconnected from other systems
Struggle to handle various contract types
How is digital contracting different from analog contracting?
Digital contracting, on the other hand, empowers every contracting stakeholder to obtain mission-critical business goals with operational efficiency, enhanced cross-functional collaboration, and mitigated risks. Digital contracting primarily:
Unifies all contract types with deep integrations —sales, procurement, marketing, and HR into one workspace, facilitating every step of the contract lifecycle from contract generation, negotiation, and approvals to signature, storage, and post-execution tracking.
Improves approval workflows with automated contract drafting. It streamlines scattered emails and communications from across disjointed business systems.
Unlocks full contract value with critical business intelligence that remains hidden in contracts. The repository becomes a powerful searchable source of truth with reportable insights that can be visualized in drillable dashboards.
Key benefits of digital contracting
Implementing digital contract management benefits the whole organization. Legal becomes an enabler, not a blocker. Sales teams can agree contracts faster without leaving the CRM. HR teams can create error-free contracts and process them in bulk, saving 75% time on paperwork.
Eliminates delays associated with physical contract handling. Contracts can be created, reviewed, and signed within hours or minutes, facilitating speed and efficiency in contract TAT.
Reduces the cost of paperwork, printing, postage, and storage. It minimizes the need for physical storage spaces and associated upkeep costs, creating a leaner contract management approach.
Offers robust security features, including encryption and access controls. The system maintains a trackable and verifiable audit trail for legal compliance and risk management.
Offers a centralized repository that enables safe storage and easy access to contract and contract data with a quick search and retrieval using AI-based filters.
Facilitates efficient real-time collaboration among multiple stakeholders across remote and distributed teams.
Grants greater visibility into the contract lifecycle with metrics and control over the process.
By embracing digital contracting, organizations can significantly improve their contract management processes, reduce risks, and achieve greater operational efficiency.
What are the key components of digital contracting?
1. Creation & management
Easily create, edit, and version control contracts using approval workflow templates based on specific contract types. These automated templates help you collaborate with internal and external stakeholders with automated reminder alerts.
2. Electronic signatures
You can safely collect legally binding signatures with electronic contract signing with native eSign options or eSign software integrations.
3. Contract repository
Store signed contracts in a centralized, secure repository. Easily search, retrieve, manage, and get the full context of contracts with smart filtering options.
4. Tracking
Auto-extraction of metadata with AI helps automate obligation tracking. Coupled with automated reminders, this feature reduces contract risk and saves time on contract administration.
Digital contracting is a transformative approach that modernizes the entire contract lifecycle, making it faster, smarter, and more collaborative. By adopting digital contracting, organizations can streamline processes, reduce risks, and unlock the full value hidden in their contracts. Book a demo and see how HyperStart digitizes and unlocks full contract potential.
