This is the second article of Agrello’s series covering contract lifecycle management. For other articles, go to our blog. Now that you know what contract lifecycle management (CLM) is exactly, let’s go into depth on each aspect. The first is the very beginning, and arguably most important step - creating a contract. Without a contract, there wouldn’t be any lifecycle to manage!

Agreeing on a contract

Of course, for a contract to come into existence at all, there must be an agreement between two people or companies. This involves a lot of steps before agreeing on terms or writing something down to form a contract.

Let's use a fictional scenario to illustrate the first stages of the contract lifecycle.

Let's assume that two large companies, Company A and Company B, want to do business with each other. Company A manufactures clothing, and Company B is a retailer that wants to buy these clothes to sell in its stores.

There is a long negotiation process in which various terms of the contract must be established. These involve things as simple as the duration of the contract and the price of the goods, but also more complex things like non-compete and non-disclosure clauses.

Once the lawyers have finished discussing the terms, the work begins to actually put everything down on paper that has been agreed upon. This is where the contract lifecycle management process begins.

Creating your contract in Agrello

So in our scenario above, Company A and Company B were large companies with lawyers behind them who can write contracts with ease. But of course there are also cases where companies don't hire lawyers but use pre-written templates or outsource the service from paralegals.

Either way, at some point someone needs to review the contracts and make sure they're OK before they're sent to a CLM.

Most often, the contracts are written in Microsoft Word or another text editing programme like Google Docs. The contracts contain the agreed-upon terms of the contract, but also certain other information such as the names of the responsible parties, the addresses of the companies or individuals, and other information about the companies, such as their registration numbers.

Agrello makes it very easy to create a document that is fillable on the Agrello platform and can conveniently be signed by both parties. When preparing a contract in MS Word, simply use {{curly brackets}} at places where you want fillable fields to appear and after uploading the document to Agrello, they can be filled in.

So, now you have a contract with all the terms nicely laid out and curly brackets for fillable fields where you can enter data into Agrello. Now you can actually use the CLM system...

Preparing a document using Agrello

Within Agrello, kicking off the creation of a document is easy. Start your 14 day trial, and create a workspace.

Your documents will live in folders in your workspace, so create a nice folder for your documents too. Simply click the green “add folder” to create a new one.

Once you’re inside your new folder, it will be a little bit blank, but no worries. To create a new document, click the green “new document”.

This will bring up your document screen, where you can drag and drop your signature fields to where you want. Remember to click “save field” to lock it in place.

You can then add signers. Add yourself, or another party by typing in their email.

With your fillable fields, you can either fill these yourself or invite the other signing party to fill them by entering their email.

If you assign other parties to fill in fields, it gets locked specifically to them. That way, you can be assured that there will be no tampering with the field and only the person you want to fill it in will fill it.

Once this is done, you can set a reminder of a key date within the contract.

Setting reminders in Agrello

A crucial part of a CLM workflow are features that help you stay on top of key dates within contracts.

With Agrello, you can set as many reminders on one document as you need- for example, you could have a series of reminders set every month starting from 6 months before the contract expires or needs renewing.  

To do this, on your document, click the bell icon, then “add reminder”. You can then choose the date, and add whatever note you want. You then receive a handy email on the date you set, containing whatever note you added.

Concluding document creation in Agrello

Then, once your document is ready with signature fields and dynamic fields have been been filled/assigned, and you have set your reminders, you can send the document for signing, by clicking the green “send for signing” button.

That concludes this second part of our CLM series. The next instalment will be about signing documents in Agrello.

‍