Poor contract management can make it necessary for your team to perform long lists of complex and time-consuming fire-fighting tasks every time needs for new agreements arise — all of which can eat up a significant amount of your company’s productivity.

Plus, failing to manage your contracts properly can result in missed opportunities or even violating legal policies and guidelines, which could cost you tens of thousands of dollars.

The good news is, you can avoid mismanaging your crucial documents with the help of contract management solutions.

That’s where ContractZen comes in. With ContractZen’s cloud-based service, you can manage your contracts easier, optimize your business operations, and help reduce risks. Although ContractZen specializes in contract workflow and document management, the platform also includes powerful tools for staying organized with your meetings and other types of documents and workflows, so that its value extends well beyond contracts.

In this review, we’ll take a look at ContractZen’s features and why it can be your solution to organized digital governance.

What is ContractZen?

ContractZen is an enterprise-grade cloud service that reduces the complexity of your corporate governance by offering a centralized, secure virtual hub for managing your contracts, meetings and file sharing.

ContractZen helps you do away with the hassles of using multiple software platforms — such as using separate tools to sign PDF documents — with its feature set that will help your team find documents easily, track due dates, organize and schedule meetings, and facilitate due diligence processes with third-party organizations.

To give you a better sense of how this all comes together, here’s what the ContractZen dashboard looks like.

Now that you have a better grasp of what ContractZen is, let’s take an in-depth look at its features and how they can help improve your company’s workflows.

Document management.

Creating a management system for your important documents can be a time-consuming and labor-intensive task.

For instance, you’ll need to sort through folders upon folders or use a simple keyword search option if you’re saving your contracts on your computer hard drive — which can make finding them a nightmare later on.

ContractZen makes this process easy for you with its meta-data driven document management system.

First off, uploading your contracts on ContractZen is a pretty straightforward process. From your dashboard menu, you can go to the Documents section, and upload your files by clicking on the upper right-hand side or by dragging and dropping them from your computer.

Once your files are uploaded, finding specific contracts, or anything else, can be a breeze with ContractZen’s search features and tools.

You can do a simple search by typing in your keyword and phrases in the Search bar and specify the folder. Or you can use the Search view option to filter your search results by contract status, expiry, date modified, and more.

ContractZen’s document search also makes use of Microsoft’s Machine Vision engine to enable optical character recognition (OCR). This means that even if your files include pdf scans or other image-based file types, you’ll still be able to find what you’re looking for by searching for phrases that appear in the document.

You can also apply advanced filters using the Select Filters option, and click on the tags you want to include.

ContractZen also offers a Saved Search feature that lets you save search filters and details you use commonly to find specific contracts quickly.

Since ContractZen’s document management feature is meta-data driven, organizing, finding, and tracking your critical documents can be a breeze. You can set up and populate the index using whatever tags make sense for your company — including workflow stage statuses, account name, file use case, privacy sensitivity levels, or anything else.

Organize your meetings with the board portal.

Scheduling and keeping up with your important events can be confusing, especially on top of managing your other business functions. ContractZen provides a solution through its all-digital board portal to help you manage your entire meeting process easily.

The feature lets you create your meeting agenda with ease, invite your attendees with just a few clicks, share your meeting materials securely, and more.

You can say goodbye to those long back and forth email chains with all the participants, trying to find a time slot that works for everybody if you schedule your meetings using the Meeting Scheduler feature. This feature lets you send a meeting request that users with access can respond to by indicating the schedule that best fits them — allowing you to find the best time slot to block in much more efficiently.

The meeting portal features include integration into Office 365 so you can view your schedule on the calendar you use, a secure discussion board, and tagging for responsible people and decision points.

You’ve also go spaces on your meeting portals to share contact details of everyone invited, a map of the meeting’s venue and agenda notes. During meetings, using personal notepad spaces, everyone can take private notes. Later, these notes can form the basis of meeting minutes, which everyone can sign, and you can even follow-up tasks to specific team members.

ContractZen’s board portal streamlines the process of scheduling your meetings and collaborating with your team or external partners more efficiently.

Facilitate due diligence with the virtual data room (VDR).

Due diligence is a key step in many business processes, whether you’re facing an acquisition, a tax audit or even just trying to establish a new partnership with another organization. However, ensuring that due diligence can be handled efficiently and securely can be challenging when you have multiple versions of your critical documents coming in left and right.

ContractZen helps you streamline due diligence with its virtual data room (VDR) tool. The VDR feature provides you with an online information repository to store and distribute your documents and help keep your materials up-to-date with ease.

You can quickly create new data rooms for ad hoc purposes, that lets you view an easy-to-use interface and go through different documents in various categories quickly.

Often, due diligence requires reviewing many types of documents across categories. ContractZen makes it easy to keep track of your progress by allowing you to add checkmarks to the queue.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, since the VDR feature also offers other features, including adding specific documents from categories in the data room and adding people to access the files.

The VDR feature also provides a reporting area that shows you the number of users who accessed the room — and an audit log that lists the history of user actions on your documents.

With ContractZen’s VDR, practicing due diligence can be smoother, less time-consuming, and efficient, which, in turn, makes for better workflows and governance.

The bottom line

ContractZen offers other useful features, but what we’ve discussed here so far can already give you a good grasp of the functionalities that the service provides to improve your contract management.

With ContractZen, you can turn your time-consuming and expensive digital governance tasks into more streamlined and efficient processes.