Where do you store your contracts? In a spreadsheet? On paper? Buried deep within your ERP? Or perhaps in a series of emails? In the hustle and bustle of the average working day, it’s often difficult to take the time to store documents securely, never mind tracking and maintaining their contents. In this article, we examine the various methods of managing deals, discuss why it’s important to keep them in one place and suggest an alternative to traditional non-secure storage methods.

Contracts can be Difficult to Manage and Hard to Find

The Institute of Supply Management is often quoted as saying that a typical Fortune 1000 company manages between 20,000 and 40,000 active contracts at any given time, at least 10 percent of which are misplaced, difficult to find… or otherwise unmanaged or forgotten. In 2022, DocuSign did a follow-up survey of more than 1,300 contracting professionals worldwide. They discovered that the situation is, in fact, far worse.  

While 68% of respondents reported needing access to completed contracts every week, they say it takes nearly an hour and a half to find specific information within a contract. That’s not the worst part, however. They report that it takes 45 minutes, on average, to find a completed contract in the first place, and, shockingly, 46% of respondents could sometimes not even find completed contracts!

The Seven Stages of Deal Management

We’re not surprised that contract management is so hard. Enable is in the business of helping organizations manage rebate deals – a process that typically involves seven stages:

• Process planning
• Process implementation
• Pre-deals
• Handover
• Deal
• Pre-renegotiation
• Post-deal

Contracts are either involved or referred to at almost every deal stage. When organizations manage their contracts efficiently and access them seamlessly, the process is significantly less painful and time-consuming for all involved.

Who is Affected by Misplaced Deals?

While streamlining contract management obviously saves time for the legal team, other people are impacted internally and externally. Internally, these can include finance teams, sales team members, marketing people, the commercial team, procurement managers, and even product teams. And then there are those outside the organization: Your customers, suppliers, retailers, franchisees, manufacturers, and so on.

Suppose the details of a rebate deal can’t be found. In that case, a delay at one stage of the process can potentially affect between 3 and 10 other parties – magnifying the impact of something that may seem insignificant at first glance.

Non-Secure Ways of Managing Your Deals

Spreadsheets

According to an article in Forbes, 88% of spreadsheets contain errors that can lead to disputes with trading partners and missed rebate claims, leading to a loss of revenue. Since Excel spreadsheets can handle complex calculations, their flexibility increases the risk of errors. You can’t use a spreadsheet in real-time, and there are auditability, collaboration, ease of use, transparency, and data translation challenges with spreadsheets. When you consider the value of a rebate management system vs. rebate accounting spreadsheets, Excel loses.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems

While ERPs are very effective tools, they aren’t the best place to manage rebate deals. One disadvantage of using an ERP system for rebate accounting is that they often can’t cope with the many different types of rebate calculations. Aspects of deals outside the ERP system can be difficult to systematize. However, when an ERP integrates with a deal management system, all information is held in one place. The result? Improved compliance, information storage, and communication exchange that facilitates business growth through optimized rebate management.

Email threads

Using email to track tasks is inherently risky. Managing rebate deals with email increases the risk of operating with outdated information, is a very insecure way of transferring confidential data, is difficult to monitor, and has a high risk of errors. An Egress report revealed that 95% of IT leaders believe that company data is at risk on email. Since 24% of email data breaches were caused by an employee sharing data in error, there has to be a better way of reducing the email data breaches experienced by 83% of organizations surveyed.

Paper

Paper-based materials such as physical written contracts can be easy to lose, get damaged, and degrade over time. Getting all parties to sign them in the first place is challenging, and the storage costs of paper alone can be prohibitive.

Benefits of Having Rebate Deals in One Location

The alternative to misplaced deals is using a streamlined solution to manage all your rebate deals in one secure location. This can save time for all parties. A report by McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) says that the productivity of those whose roles involve reading and answering emails, searching and gathering information, communicating and collaborating internally, and role-specific tasks can be improved by up to 25% with the right technologies.

By digitizing deal management sooner rather than later, you reduce physical paperwork while ensuring remote access for all parties via the cloud. An efficient deal management tool like Enable can improve workforce collaboration and streamline workflows – so your organization can be more organized while meeting compliance requirements.

Your business needs a centralized deal repository to improve version control, leverage the power of templated agreements, and improve interactions with your trading partners. With an audit trail, automated notifications, and secure, controlled limits on who can access, edit and share contracts and deal-related information, you can ensure employees only access relevant information.

If data security is top of mind, remember that powerful rebate management software like Enable provides a single source of truth for your rebates, significantly mitigating the risk of data confusion. Our advanced security and compliance measures help keep your data safe.

Of course, managing rebates effectively can also incentivize long-term relationships with your trading partners, improving collaboration and making it extremely easy and efficient to pay and collect rebates on time.

How Enable Gives you one Centralized Location

A centralized rebate management platform allows your rebate team to jointly view and process trading agreements, rebate figures, and data.

The benefits of managing all your rebate deals in one secure location include better collaboration, organized and streamlined data, and a full audit trail. You can even achieve a single version of the truth with rebate management software.

Sign up to start your free trial of Enable’s rebate management solution if you’re ready to manage all your rebate deals securely, bringing benefits to all parties in the rebate management chain (or if you just want to know why everyone’s talking about us).