Switching to Digital Contract Management – Paperless Office
A paperless office with digital contracts is an excellent trend for any cutting-edge business to follow. This is not surprising since keeping paper contracts out of the equation has significant benefits. If you want to reduce paper usage easily, online contract management software is the best solution.
Why Switch to Online Contract Management?
Transitioning to an online contract system
Storing contracts on various platforms and tracking details manually works if your business handles a minimal amount of agreements. When companies rapidly expand, an online contract system is necessary. The switch positions you to handle a large number of new contracts later on. You can efficiently manage your new agreements with the software’s features to improve your overall deal success.
What is a paperless office?
A paperless office utilizes digital documents, significantly reducing their paper waste. The trend of transitioning to a paper-free work environment has existed since personal computers. However, it’s becoming more popular each year with increased environmental concerns. Offices that digitize pledge to move to digital contracts and benefit from increased productivity, reduced costs, improved security, and a reduced carbon footprint.
An office that completely or significantly reduces its use of paper by using digital documents is known as a paperless office. The idea of switching to a paperless office has been around since the invention of the personal computer — recently it gained popularity as a result of growing environmental concerns. The advocates contend that a paperless workplace not only benefits a green environment but also hastens the process of an organization’s digital transformation. Usually, this entails pivoting to an electronic management system that digitalizes documents and keeps them in a centralized repository.
What are the benefits of going paperless?
Numerous American businesses spend more than $120 billion annually on printed materials that are then discarded after a few months because they are no longer useful. Additionally, 40% of office workers’ time is spent looking for documents in actual file cabinets.
Working with printed documentation hinders staff productivity and prevents organizations from implementing cost-saving strategies. Adopting a paperless system can resolve these issues and provide the following advantages:
Saves time from searching for files
Finding the files you need is significantly quicker with digital documents because they can be easily organized and indexed – the time it takes to get the files is drastically reduced as documents become more accessible, allowing your employees to work more efficiently and concentrate on other important duties.
Increases productivity and efficiency among team members
Employees can access current and previous versions of documents and distribute them digitally without printing. This reduces the process and improves productivity when working with documents among team members.
Improves security of information
Depending on the user level and type of document, rights can be granted and denied. Confidential and sensitive information can be monitored and safeguarded against misuse and unauthorized changes with the help of granular security settings — lessening the chance of theft and loss.
Saves money on printing costs
By getting rid of paperwork, you can save money on paper expenditures as well as other expenses like photocopier ink and office supplies.
5 Benefits of Digital Contracts
Digital contract negotiations and signing are no longer difficult
As businesses look for new ways to transition to a paperless office, digital solutions become increasingly accessible. Processes such as digital contract signing and negotiations are no longer complicated because of the influx of digital management tools. Organizations that rely on paper forms are significantly slowed down, experience higher costs, and have lower success compared to those who use digital contracts.
Digital solutions are becoming easier to get as organizations search for new methods to make the switch to paperless offices. The introduction of digital management technologies has simplified procedures like digital contract signing and negotiations. Comparatively to businesses that employ digital contracts, those that use paper forms operate much slower, cost more money, and have poorer success.
Digital contracting is a cloud-based contract management solution that facilitates contract creation and maintenance. The entire contact management lifecycle is digitalized, including creating, revising, negotiating, signing, and tracking contracts. It also interfaces with other applications in your workflows.
Digital contracting typically provides you with the following benefits:
1. Environmental benefits of going paperless
Not only will your company benefit from digital contract solutions, but the Earth will too. Paper manufacturing is the culprit for a significant amount of greenhouse gases, deforestation, and climate change. Recycling minimally combats the environmental effects, and a majority of paper still ends up in a landfill.
Additionally, printer ink contains hazardous chemicals which are harmful to the environment. By switching to a paperless office, your company will be doing its part to diminish climate change.
2. Reduction in costs
Online processes such as digital contract signing eliminate the need to buy office supplies. Digitized companies reduce their costs by cutting expenses from paper and ink, printer maintenance, delivery fees, recycling costs, and more. Not only will your company save on office supplies, but you will save on labor costs. You will no longer need to pay individuals for repetitive, high-volume tasks such as file management.
When using digital contract signing, you can forget about purchasing office materials. Companies that have gone digital minimize costs by editing out most of their office expenditures – paper and ink, printer maintenance, shipping fees, recycling costs, shipping, etc.
3. Conveniently access essential documents
Contracts are difficult to access when stored in various places such as email inboxes, hard drives, cabinets, and folders. Keeping your agreements on an online platform means that team members can quickly access vital documents.
Accessibility is crucial during these unprecedented times where many employees are forced to work from home. When your team cannot work at the office, they must have remote access to your documents if you want to keep your business on track.
4. Higher accuracy of documents
It’s challenging to stay on top of mistakes when your contracts aren’t stored on the best online contract management software. When you keep agreements in a single online repository, you can see every detail and make adjustments in one place. Additionally, human error will no longer negatively impact your deals. Electronic contracts improve your document accuracy by providing insight, collaboration, and the ability to make needed adjustments quickly.
5. Improved data security
Paper documents are left vulnerable to loss, damage, and misfiling. Also, physical copies make it difficult to prevent individuals from accessing your private information. The best online contract management software has modern security features that resolve these issues.
With CMS applications, documents are stored on a secure cloud-based platform, keeping them safe from loss and peeping eyes. Administrators can also assign access rights at a document, user, and system levels. To add an extra security boost, digital contract signing features have various layers of authentication, ensuring that individuals cannot forge, tamper with, or copy your signature.
Documents are protected from loss and prying eyes by being stored on a secure cloud-based platform with digital contract management software. Access rights can also be given to the document by administrators. Digital contract signing offers many forms of authentication to further increase security, preventing anyone from altering, forging, or copying your signature.
6. Automated contract processes
Contract negotiations are known for being time and energy-consuming. They frequently involve a lot of back and forth with several parties and extensive negotiations.
Thankfully, digital contracting simplifies the processes of contracts and their lifecycle. Digital contracting platforms will assist you in quickly creating and launching contract approval and generating processes by providing you with tools like Workflow Designer. The creation of contracts through workflow templates, modifying terms as necessary, tagging fields that need to be filled out, and adding the required signers and approvers will save you from having to create contracts from scratch.
7. A digitized hub
All of your organization’s contracts can be stored in a consolidated, searchable cloud that includes digital contracting tools. This digital portal will speed up the contract lifecycle management process, increase contract visibility, and improve contract accessibility for authorized team members when needed.
8. Various signing methods
Embedded signatures and clickwrap are features of digital contracting signing that make it simpler for users to sign documents on any device, at any time, and from any location.
9. Environmental friendly
Digital contracting will benefit not just your business but also the environment. The production of paper is responsible for greenhouse emissions, deforestation, and climate change. Even though recycling partially mitigates the consequences on the environment; paper still ends up in a landfill.
So, by switching to a paperless office, your business may help slow down climate change.
How does CMS help companies switch to a paper-free workplace?
Digital contract management software is a simple way to improve your agreement workflow. It allows for enhanced management with features such as a digital repository, document insight, and organization. Furthermore, your business can be sure that its sensitive information is safe from loss and theft.
How does CMS help companies switch to a paper-free workplace?
A paper-free workplace is what every company should strive for. The pivot helps in reducing clutter, making it easier and quicker to find important documents, and saves money.
A simple strategy to progressively become paperless in your office is to integrate digital contract software into your current workflow. Your business will benefit from the perks of digitalization, including lower costs, better accuracy, greater success rates, and increased security, when you make the switch to paperless contracts. All of these benefits are what contract management solutions are all about. Contract management solutions are software that helps companies manage the contracts they enter into with their customers and vendors. CMS is a quick and easy method to streamline your agreement workflow. They can provide a centralized repository of all contracts and agreements, document insight, and organization, making them easier to find. This way, contracts can be accessed anytime and anywhere.
Implementing a digital contract app into your pre-existing workflow is a painless way to transition to a paperless office gradually. When you transition to paperless contracts, your company will benefit from the advantages of digitization, such as reduced costs, improved accuracy, higher success rate, and increased security.
