Contract automation with Contractbook - an inspiration catalogue

We are living in an automation age. Automation has already been changing most people’s daily work activities for many years, and that is unlikely to stop as the emerging technologies mature and prove applicable in more and more use cases. Mckinsey estimates that about half of all the activities people are paid to do can already be automated with current technologies. Automation is not only the future. It is also the present.

Automation is not a single technology. The concept covers all the different technologies by which a process is performed without or with minimal human assistance. But no matter if you are automating a manufacturing process, or like Contractbook, automating workflows for sales teams, HR and people working within operations.

First of all, automation technologies reduce the cost significantly by minimizing the use of manual human labour. Secondly, automation increase consistency and improves the quality of the output. Machines are not just faster; they are also more reliable when they perform repetitive and standardized work which reduces the number of human errors. And thirdly, automation generates a huge productivity boost as it makes processes significantly more efficient and scalable. While the steam engine boosted the productivity with 0.3%in the second half of the 19th Century - automation is expected to increase productivity by 1.4 % before 2065.

Automation as a concept originates from the Ford Factories in the 1940s and has impacted blue-collar workers and industrial labour. But it is becoming apparent that white-collar workers such as lawyers, accountants, secretaries, bankers, journalists and designers also will have large chunks of their jobs automated. All the tedious, repetitive and non-complex manual routines can and will be automated in the coming years. Some jobs will be replaced, other professions will appear, and the future of work will look a lot different from what it does now.

As mentioned in one of our podcasts, the Finish thinker Esko Kilpi once said that the future of work is going to be interactions between interdependent people. So if parts of your work are repetitive and you can do it alone, tech can most likely do it faster, cheaper and better. But that does not mean that everything is going to be automated. Humans will be in charge of establishing good human relationships and performing most collaborative and creative work where machines are inferior to humans.
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Contract automation

All of this is highly relevant if you are working with contracts. Any contract workflow is full of dull and repetitive manual processes. That means you will most likely benefit from automating your legal work if you have a high frequency of low complexity contracts, or if your contracts require a high amount of manual touchpoints. Imagine clauses that must be found and inserted, data that must be moved from system til system, and all the other small things that slow you down. All these manual tasks make you more prone to making legal errors, they harm your productivity, and they end up taking time that you could have used elsewhere.

That is why we have decided to enrich our end-to-end contract lifecycle management platform with data-enabled automation features that allow you to automate every single part of the process. From questionnaire-based document generators to self-executing tasks management and advanced integrations.

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Since the beginning, we have chosen to store our contracts in a database which enables you to make smart and dynamic contracts where you can leverage all the data it contains to automate your workflow and prepare yourself for a smarter future. However, you don’t need over-hyped Blockchain or expensive AI to work smarter here and now. Contractbook gives you the opportunity to automate all the essential parts of your workflow here, now and in years to come.

We advise you to get in touch with one of our automation consultants who can assess your workflow and find out how we can improve your unique setup. It’s essential to find the exact parts of the flow where automation makes the most considerable difference, so you can boost your productivity, reduce the costs, and the minimize human errors in your contracts where it matters.

The possibilities are endless as Contractbook enables you to connect your contract workflow with more than 3000 other tools and applications. By combining them, you can set up infinite customised ways of making your own self-executing contracts and build whole chains of automated triggers. You can make the Rocky soundtrack play whenever you sign a new deal, build your own webshops with WordPress, generate payslips based on contracts, double store your documents in multiple servers or even trigger social media posts of sad kitties whenever a contract is rejected. Are you overwhelmed? No surprise. It can be hard to see the wood for the trees when there are so many opportunities available.
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That is why we have decided to package our product with a Foundation and 4 different add-ons (for HR, sales, operations and compliance) that helps individual teams automate their workflows.

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So to give you a more tangible idea of what you can do, we have listed some inspiration to what you can do here.

Auto-generated contracts

In a quest to rethink the contract creation process, we have designed a brilliant tool to auto-generate flawless contracts in no time. 

Instead of writing each contract from scratch or browsing through an extensive template library, you can use a well-designed and intuitive questionnaire to generate your contracts. Answer a few questions and insert a few variable data points and there you go; a final, flawless contract ready for signature. 

This contract generator is not only faster, but it also produces more reliable results. It works especially well for larger organisations that generate a high volume of contracts and need to maintain a strict level of consistency of their contracts - whether for commercial or compliance reasons. Take a sales department as an example. Instead of letting your sales reps draft up sales contracts and run the risk of having them make errors in the contract, you can simply just give them a fool-proof questionnaire to fill out, and the contract is automatically drafted for them. The solution works for all kinds of departments: sales, procurements, human recourses, legal counsel, you name it.

You set up the questionnaire, and based on a few given answers; you generate a standardized contract to be signed. You can even make small tooltips, videos and articles to guide your employees through the process.

In companies like LuggageHero and Stambz, they use this solution to boost their rates by closing deals on the spot when their sales people are visiting potential new customers. They just hand over a phone, let the new customer fill in their information i and then an agreement is automatically generated to be signed via SMS by both parties. On the spot! That setup has helped LuggageHero grow and scale internationally since it gives them a central overview of their deals while ensuring a consistent quality of their contracts.

The last example we want to give you is our very own data processor agreement setup which is a crucial part of the Compliance add-on. When you create a profile with Contractbook, you have to fill in a questionnaire. That provides us with the information we need to auto-generate a data processor agreement based on our standardized template and already signed by us. In that way, we have automated the tedious manual task of collecting data processor agreements from all our new customers. It saves us a lot of time and ensures that we are compliant with the GDPR. We also ensure a strict compliance regime by only using the same template for all our customers.

Other ways to automatically create contracts

The questionnaire is not the only way to auto-generate new contracts. You can also set up automated workflows where certain actions trigger the creation of a new contract. Maybe a deal stage is changed in your CRM-system, or maybe the creation of an employment contract also triggers the auto-creation of an NDA based on the data inputs in previous contracts, or maybe a data collection form on your website auto-generates a new partnership contract in your Contractbook account. 

Thanks to our dynamic data format, we enable the data points to move seamlessly between systems and thereby make these automated workflows. 

Automate your sales workflow

The Sales add-on is designed to empower your sales team and automate most of your sales contract workflows, so you can focus on closing deals and hitting gongs. It enables you to integrate with your CRM-system to keep one source of truth and everything in sync. The systems updates automatically, so you can get rid of mindless copy-pasting tasks and keep things consistent.

We also enables sales teams to automate reminders and obligations generated from sales contracts to stay on top of renewals, upsells and pricing adjustments. In that way sales teams remain on point, in control and ahead of the curve.

Most cases are actually pretty simple but it's worth mentioning a more complex use case that really shows how impactful contract automation can be: Dreivers is a P2P car trading platform for selling second-hand cars. They are always looking for opportunities to optimise their workflow as they run a high-volume/low margin business. To help them improve their workflow, we made an assessment of their entire sales journey and looked into how we could automate all the manual touch points. The result is an smooth workflow where we have automated all the manual parts of the process. From lead to done deal, we have set up triggers and actions and integrated with their CRM-system, so all the data is updated at all times.

Their sales journey includes various documents: sales contracts, purchase agreements and power of attorneys - and since we have automated this entire flow; all these contracts are created, signed and organised by a chain of triggers. As you can read in this customer story, this advanced automated setup has led to a 30 % reduction in working hours spend on every single purchase. That has resulted in a 25 % cost reduction in the entire company.

Dreivers are using Pipedrive, but we are able to integrate with all the most common CRM-systems (including Hubspot and Salesforce) and create a similar automation flow for your sales department. In fact, we are using an integration with Hubspot to automate our own sales processes as well.

Communication and project management

Automation can help you work smarter with your contracts in multiple ways. A popular solution is to connect Contractbook with other communication and project management tools to increase the collaboration and transparency on your team.

We can easily set up integrations with your workspace in Slack, so you are noticed every time a contract is signed, or changes to a deal are requested. This integration can also work as an extended reminder setup, so you get Slack notifications for all your contract reminders. If you prefer these notifications in your email or Teams that work as well.

The case is the same for project management tools like Airtable, Asana or Trello. A great example is a setup we have created for Mutebox. Whenever an order is collected in their Shopify-integrated online shop, a rent agreement and a Trello card is automatically generated, so they can access and approve their contracts before signing them.

Connecting Contractbook with a tool like Trello is also a good idea if you want to integrate all your contract-related tasks to your daily workflow and ensure you meet all your obligations. Read the customer story about Mutebox here.

This part os part of all our add-ons. Just reach out and we will help you ensure everyone is on the same page.

Automate your HR

Just as we automated an entire sales journey for Dreivers, we can also automate most of the workflow for HR-departments, so you get rid of all the tedious manual tasks related to onboarding new employees.

Firstly, we can automate the generation of employment contracts, non-disclosure agreements and all the other legal documents you need when expanding your team.

Secondly, we also integrate with all your HR-tools so you can ensure a smooth and professional onboarding of new recruits. We have also launched integrations with pay slips systems so you can auto-generate payslips and sync the data based on your employment contracts.

Just reach out, and we will design a solution for you that will help get rid of human errors and get more time to connect with people.

Emails

We are not only offering contract automation solutions for the creation, signing and management process. With our mass uploading feature and our brand new Gmail Importer, we can also automate the storing and organising part of your contract lifecycle.

Our Gmail Importer can extract contracts from your Gmail account and upload them to your Contractbook account so you can make sure that you have all your contracts gathered in a single organised overview. You can decide which domains you want to import from, sort the list of contracts and organise them as you want, but the entire scanning process is completely automated. You can even connect your Gmail account to your Contractbook account so that contracts received in your email are automatically uploaded to Contractbook.

Saving time on that tasks is an obvious advantage. But you also get a much more compliant setup, when your contracts are not scattered all over many different platforms. Having everything in one place gives you an invaluable overview so you never miss a deadline, make sure all obligations are met and can be proactive in re-negotiations.