Navigating the Contract Management Landscape: 5 best practices for Business Owners

Contract management is a crucial and recurring activity in any project management workflow. But even with such prime importance, managing contracts is usually treated like ‘regular paperwork’.

But bad contract practices lead to unnecessary legal hurdles and costs that hurt the reputation of your field service business. For the price you have to pay, it is better to invest in good contracting software that helps you automate and track your contracting workflows.

Read further to learn more about effective practices for contract management to avoid irreversible surprises in your business.

Challenges In Contract Management For Field Service Businesses

Contract management hurdles are a result of poor management practices and a lack of automation. It’s not wise to treat your contracting obligations like routine work, or else you will face below mentioned hurdles:

• Unclear contract documentation: According to World Commerce and Contracting, 26% of contracts underperform for the task intended. As a result, lose time and resources, while your contract fails to help you when required.
• Managing multiple contracts: As you scale your business, your paperwork would also increase exponentially. Lack of digitization for modern project management hurts profits and wastes your time.
• Managing change requests: Customers will ask for changes in appointment times, type of service, field service technician etc at any point. As a service provider, you will have to adhere to those requests, which may cause many changes in your contract paperwork.
• Remaining compliant: in your contracts, you must ensure you are complying with the necessary guidelines by the government or authorities. Compliance checks are also required from time to time to ensure the contract is being followed.

5 Best Practices For Effective Contract Management

Make time to focus on servicing new customers and growing your field service business by taking care of contract management as follows:

Adopt a contract management software

Contract management software digitizes your business contracts for seamless management. You can edit, delete, assign or change a request any number of times, thus reducing the time for any rework. It successfully reduces your administrative costs and your field service teams can focus on better tasks at hand that grow the business.

For example, using a field service management software like Zuper, you can extract data from your contracts to make informed decisions about service delivery.

Make documentation a priority

It’s easy to manage and delegate manual tasks when you have Standard Operating Procedures in place. Use a checklist to ensure every aspect of your agreement is clearly articulated in the contract. Mention your payment terms, deadlines, expectations, dispute resolution methods, rights of every party involved, etc. 

A well-formatted contract is the first step towards ensuring no misunderstanding arises when you start the project. Adopting good documentation practices also reduces the contract cycle by reducing rework.

Make sure your field service teams understand the contracts

So you signed the contract and agreed on the terms mentioned – but what about your vendors and field service teams? Do they understand the expectations of the contract from them?

You can conduct a workshop that highlights the contractual terms and clear any doubts they might have. Getting buy-in from your field service technicians ensures they make decisions on the job site that help maintain the contractual obligations without your constant interference. It also helps them know what activities are tracked for ensuring performance.

Track jobs to be done as per the contract

Good contract management software will also include features to track the job. With this, you can know if your contract is being followed or not to raise any concerns. You can also share updates on the project’s progress to nurture a pleasing customer experience. 

Monitoring contracts also help you identify potential delays and take measures to avoid the same. If you’re a customer of a field service provider, you can track your billables and ensure you are delivered the promised value from the contract.

Use templates, but wisely

Contract management software also provides you with options to create templates for different business services you provide and workflows. While it helps create and send contracts faster, you should also be careful about what you’re adding to the contract.

Errors in contracting can turn ugly very easily. It also leads to delays in starting the project on time as you may have to spend time correcting them. Keep template edits for variables and use checklists to ensure you are not creating any room for errors.

Invest in contract management software to implement the best practices

The five best practices are easy to incorporate into your workflows if you use contract management software. This helps you automate and streamline your manual tasks in contracting.

You can explore Zuper, a field service management software that includes features for managing contracts effectively. Book a demo to know how Zuper can help your field service business today.

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varsha

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