Contract management best practices
- TermsBird Pro, $12.41 a month for the whole business
- $148.92
- What that is per live contract over the period
- $1.86
- What looking for contracts costs you over the same period
- $1,512
The scoring in the sheet comes from the figures you enter about your own contracts. Any vendor price named on this site is read from that vendor's own pricing page on a stated date and recorded with its source.
Contract management best practice at small-business size is a much shorter list than the category implies, because most of the published advice is written for organisations with a contract manager, an approvals workflow and a legal team. A business with a few dozen to a few hundred agreements and nobody whose whole job is paperwork needs to get four things right, and can safely ignore almost everything else until it is much larger. Those four are: one place, the dates recorded as fields, the obligations owned by a named person, and an export you could actually use.
Open the Contract management software comparison Free to use. No account, no card, no trial clock.
One place, and it is not an inbox
Every executed agreement in a single record, filed against the counterparty. Not a drive plus an inbox plus a folder on somebody's laptop. This sounds obvious and is the practice most often broken, usually by one person filing things somewhere sensible to them.
Dates as fields, never as clauses to be found later
Effective date, end date, renewal term and notice days are data, not prose. Recorded as fields they can be counted forward and warned about; left in clause 14 they are found in an audit or after a renewal, and there is no third option.
Every obligation has a person's name against it
A contract is a set of promises in both directions, and the ones your business made are the ones that hurt. Each should be a dated item with an owner. An obligation owned by the company is owned by nobody.
Prove you can leave
Once a year, export everything and open it. A record you cannot get out of the system is not a record, it is a subscription. This is a five-minute test that most businesses never run until the day they need it to have worked.
Something the Contract management best practices does not settle about your contracts?
Tell us what you are keeping contracts in today and what went wrong last time, and a person here will tell you straight whether TermsBird helps.
What the person who keeps the contracts asks about the Contract management best practices
What are the best practices in contract management for a small business?
One place for every executed agreement; the dates recorded as fields rather than left in clauses; every obligation assigned to a named person with a due date; and an export you have actually tested. Get those four and you have closed both of the ways a contract record fails.
How often should contracts be reviewed?
Reviewing on a calendar is less useful than reviewing on an event. Look at a contract when it is about to renew, when it is amended, and when the relationship changes. An annual review of everything mostly produces a list nobody acts on.
Who should own contract management in a small business?
One named person, usually the office or operations manager, with the owner as backup. The failure mode is not the wrong person, it is no person, or three people who each think one of the others is doing it.
What is the single highest-value thing to fix first?
The notice periods on anything that auto-renews. That is the only part of contract administration where being a day late costs real money, and it is usually a morning's work to get every renewal date and notice period into one list.
TermsBird Pro
Keeping the contract after the sheet has scored it
You keep the contracts. Pro holds each one against its counterparty with its effective date, expiry, notice period and value, warns you before the notice window closes, keeps the obligations somebody in the business owes under it, and exports the lot whenever you ask, so leaving is never a hostage situation.
- Take the contract record away as a file whenever you want it
- Send a renewal notice with nothing on it but your business
- Come back next quarter and find the contracts still there
- Put your logo on the notices and letters that go to a counterparty
- Export every contract, date and obligation at once, so leaving is never a hostage situation
- Send the renewal notice or termination letter from the record it belongs to
$12per month, whole team
Start TermsBird Pro PricingTermsBird Pro is $12.41 a month, billed monthly, and it renews on the same day each month at the same price until you cancel. The price and this renewal are shown again on the checkout page before you pay.