Comparison of contract registration software

Many companies struggle with contract management. Forgetting about the tacit renewal of a contract is one of the worst things that can happen to you. You certainly wouldn't be the first to forget about your facility contracts: Oracle for example forgot to cancel the rental contract of their office costing them at least a million. Contract management however does not just revolve around catching tacit renewals; there is a whole array of challenges to address.

Challenges

Contract renewal was already discussed, but what about contracts which simply expire. Acquiring a new contract may take a lot of time. While you may very well be able to do without cleaning services for a week or two, suddenly missing out on one of the key ingredients for you business may stall your operations completely.
Another issue is the retrieval of contracts. As companies become larger different departments may start contracting their own suppliers and customers. When the legal department then needs to handle a contract dispute, it may be very hard to find the actual contract. Do you know where your contracts are stored?

Solutions

We will now look at how some of the most used contract management software addresses the two of the above problems.

Cloudtract

Cloudtract is a young contract management company from the Netherlands and provides a very basic contract management solution. Quoting their website: After making a 5-figure mistake, we created Cloudtract, the world's simplest online contract management software. They focus on the renewal notifications while keeping the process of managing contracts very simple. This however does mean that they do not really help you out with the contract retrieval.

Contracked

Contracked is another Dutch company with representations around the world. Contracked is a much more mature contract management solution and would thus be a good solution for anyone looking for functionality beyond just the renewal notifications. Their interface is however a bit dated making the application less usefull on mobile devices.

AlertA

AlertA is a Belgium based contract management vendor which has been around since 2001. They offer various versions of their contract management solutions including a webbased and Windows based version. For organisations who are just getting into contract management, they offer a low cost contract management solution which I found to work great on mobile devices as well.

Contraxx

Contraxx is a US based contract management solution supplier. Their software focusses on automating the complete office paper workflow, including contract management. While this may bring many advantages for enterprise clients, implementation is usually a long term process and fairly expensive.

Conclusion

While some contract management solutions were reviewed in this acticle, there are many more. The most important step when setting out to solve your contract management problem is to thing about which aspects you want to have covered by software. Is it just renewal, or are you also interested in digitizing higher level business processes such as the contracting workflow? Based on those requirements you need to start looking for the right vendor.