A Milestone Shiny as Tin: 10 Years in Business

This month, Blueridge Software celebrates the 10-year anniversary of Contract Assistant – the leading contract management software for organizations of any size and budget!

Ten years of stable growth, product releases, and customer support is a proud milestone. And it’s something our customers can also appreciate, considering Contract Assistant is the business tool they use to help manage the contracts and documents that govern the operations of their organizations.

Many software companies tend to present themselves today as software-as-a-service (SaaS), offering their services on a subscription basis via the web. However, hidden implications and risks of choosing such a vendor must be carefully explored and evaluated.

A few months ago, our industry reported the hasty closure of Mumboe, a SaaS contract management company. It gave clients just two weeks to access and download all of their stored data before shutting down its site and web-based service for good in November 2011. Such a rapid fold was a tough enough situation for its customers, let alone them having to begin yet another search and implementation of a replacement contract management software.

This situation again presents the argument for whether to trust your critical documents to a SaaS company or traditional software. SaaS companies store your information and records on their system. And in the event of a service failure or company shuttering, you may or may not get those records back; and if you do, they may not necessarily be in a viable file format for you to use. Granted, the anytime/anywhere access and instant software updates have a certain appeal, but keep in mind the drawbacks of vulnerability to internet service interruptions and application closures.

When you purchase and own the software outright, your critical contracts and other legal documents remain on your system and under your full control. Access to your data and to the program is indefinite, regardless of the selling company’s future state, your internet service connection, or whatever else. With virtualization options available, you can setup anytime/anywhere access to the program across the devices and access points you use to run your business. Plus, you can rest assured that with your information stored on your network, your security serves as the best protection.

If you’re currently in the market for a contract management software solution, consider Contract Assistant™. With Contract Assistant, users in organizations of all sizes can manage their contracts and negotiated agreements with confidence by quickly accessing information, generating reports, receiving automatic reminders of critical dates, and more. Contract Assistant is available in single-user Standard Edition, multi-user PRO Edition, and powerful, SQL-based Enterprise Edition.

What’s Popular About Contract Management Software

Contract Management Software

We started Contract Assistant Connection – our blog focused on contract management software – 18 months ago. It’s now filled with articles about best practices to manage contracts, tips on selecting the best contract management software for your organization, and news and updates about our own solution.

Let’s take a moment to reflect on what has been said here so far, specifically: what drives readers to this blog? And what posts are the most popular? Here are the answers in a digest recapping the high points over the past year and a half.

Top Three Most Popular Posts

1. News Flash: Introducing Contract Assistant PRO Edition 3.7!
2. Key Benefits of Contact Administration
3. 8 Steps to Choosing a Contract Management Solution

It’s not much of a surprise that readers are interested most in Contract Assistant, the benefits of properly managing contracts, and ideas about criteria to identify and select the right solution.

Why? Because businesses today have more contracts than ever — and those contracts are increasingly complex! Add to that situation an ever-increasing pressure to drive costs lower and the result is longer-term agreements with suppliers of all types. But organizations need to be aware and vigilant before, during, and after signing those and any other contracts. A sure-fire tool to help is a contract management system to protect them from the costs and risks of less than optimally managing the stacks of agreements.

Instead of overstretching employees who are responsible for administering contracts and increasing the chances for human error, implement contract management software to help those employees more carefully manage the documents governing organizations. The best solutions help to manage all types of contracts and negotiated agreements by providing quick access to important information, sending automatic reminders of critical dates, generating useful reports, and more.

Top Topic Drivers

1. Contract management and software benefits
2. Contract and document retention practices
3. Contract management use cases

Considering the list of risks associated with no or poor contract management, is it any wonder why readers are exploring the benefits, best practices, and case studies? What business doesn’t want to reduce and avoid: “lost” contract information; unwanted auto-renewals; unnecessary expense resulting from duplication or overlap of contracted services; missed critical milestones; potential liability due to inadvertent breach; and voiding of contracts due to neglect or inaccurate administration?

For more information about document retention policies, see these prior posts. And here is a quick case study of how Texas A&M-Corpus Christi solved their contract management issues with Contract Assistant. It’s all in their spotlight profile in NACUBO’s Business Officer magazine!

If you’re currently in the market for a contract management software solution, consider Contract Assistant™. With Contract Assistant, users in organizations of all sizes can manage their contracts and negotiated agreements with confidence by quickly accessing information, generating reports, receiving automatic reminders of critical dates, and more. Contract Assistant is available in single-user Standard Edition, multi-user PRO Edition, and powerful, SQL-based Enterprise Edition.

Avoiding the Crisis Trap: Figuring Out What’s Important vs. What’s Urgent

By: Judy Tucker, business consultant, Blueridge Software, Inc.

Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I had the luck to be caught up in the early days of the PC industry. Knowing nothing about computers, I stumbled into a fledging software company and soon found myself climbing what passed for a corporate ladder.

Those were heady times, as the power of computing moved from huge machines kept behind locked doors to small boxes sitting on the desks of ordinary people.

The growth rate of our young company was insane. As events piled on top of one another, time became our most precious resource. We didn’t have to go looking for the future; it slammed into us.

Contract Management for Corporate Counsel

Sura Nualpradid / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

All too often, attorneys working in a law department of a corporation need to serve in job roles and functions other than just that of a lawyer. Human resources, financial resources and technological resources of a corporation are now always under constant scrutiny – forcing practitioners to search, validate and implement solutions that boost productivity and increase compliance while reducing liabilities and business risk.

Technology is a sought-after category to accomplish more with less, and this is where attorneys act as tech experts. First they must investigate software and other tools applicable to the specialized functions of their department, then partner with Finance to determine potential return on investment and gain purchase approval, and finally work with Information Technology to deploy the solutions. At this point, the external technological resources must become integral in the internal corporate counsel processes in order to maximize the potential benefits of the technological investment.

Key Benefits of Contract Administration

In previous posts, we’ve talked about how contracts are an important part of administering your business operations and how contract management software is a leading tool to help you stay organized, up-to-date, and maintain quick and easy access to your most important documents.

If you stop for a moment and really think about the significant influence contracts exert on your business, you cannot dispute the importance of accurately managing them through their entire lifecycle. Maybe that’s why you are investigating – or have even already purchased – contract management software. But implementing such a solution isn’t just about importing contracts to have electronic copies and then maybe setting a few alarms to remind you of key dates. To proactively reduce risk and business liability, and maximize operational efficiency and profitability, you need to practice effective contract administration – the ongoing governance of each contract.

How Are You Maintaining Your Document Retention Policy? (And Do You Have One?)

If you were asked about how well you adhere to your business’s document retention policy, how would you answer? Could you even answer? Do you know what your document retention policy is – or if one even exists in your organization? A full-functioning contract management software system can help you answer those and related questions quickly and easily.

Depending on your industry, document and record retention can be vital – if not regulated and required – for you to actively participate. From the Sarbanes-Oaxley Act to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA) to other government policies, document management and retention has become an all-too-important task for CIOs and other business executives.

Contracts Defined

Contracts Defined

Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a contract as:

• a binding agreement between two or more persons or parties
• a business arrangement for the supply of goods or services at a fixed price

Contracts are the documents governing the administrative operations of your business or organization. The complexity of the different contracts ranges depending on the size of your business, your industry, etc. Some contracts are simple and administer everyday tasks like janitorial services. But increasingly complex contracts can quickly creep into your business as your growth scales with success. While it might be suitable to manually manage a few contracts as you get started, it is a job that can reach an overwhelming level almost overnight without the right tools in place.