Keeping track of maintenance contracts can be tedious. Contrary to popular belief, the biggest problem isn’t tracking the expiration of the contract. Rather, it’s tracking everything that happens against the contract until expiration i.e. performance, compliance, budget, invoices, purchases, etc. The good news is that there are ways to simplify this task. What are these ways and how can you use them to keep track of maintenance contracts? This is something we’ll be looking at in detail here.
Understanding Maintenance Contracts
Before you find out the ways to keep track of maintenance contracts, it’s important for you to understand what maintenance contracts and what’s included in them. A maintenance contract is defined as an agreement between two parties which makes one party liable for maintaining an asset owned by the other. Assets that maintenance contracts are created for include computers, building, equipment, landscape, information technologies, and many other things.
In simple terms, a maintenance contract is an agreement to maintain something. The process starts with the setting of the expectations, timeline, requirements, and price. Terms that are not to be included in the contract will also be identified. The terms are then negotiated before the parties finalize things with a maintenance contract form. Now, changes in these terms may be requested by one or both parties at some point in the future. Once the changes are made, it becomes extremely important to carefully track and review them. So, how can you keep track of maintenance contracts for changes? Let’s find out.
Keeping Track of Your Contracts
By learning the best and most-efficient ways of keeping track of your contracts, you will save both time and money. With all the invoicing and contracts you manage each day, it’s easy to feel like you spend most of your day doing tedious tasks! So how can you keep your desk and brain clear of the clutter from this pile of work? Following are five ways to keep track of your contracts and streamline your workload.
1. Put Everything Online
Want to make contract management easy for yourself? If yes, then put all your contract documents online. By managing contracts and invoices through online systems or services, you will make it easy and quick for yourself to keep track of maintenance contracts and allow your partner (s) to sign and return things to do. After you put everything online, you’ll be able to find all contracts and invoices under the online folder of each partner.
In addition to the above, by having everything online, you will eliminate information silos. This means that you will be able to access all aspects of your contacts from a single repository. This will make contract management easier for you, your partners, and your customers.
2. Have a Contract Administrator
Ideally, you should have just one individual responsible for managing the official contract document. By ensuring the use of due diligence, reviewing terms and conditions, and coordinating any changes, administrators improving the tracking and management of maintenance of contracts. By doing the above, the administrator develops the ability to make necessary changes without creating additional drafts each time whenever amendments are requested and agreed upon.
By having just one person to manage the contract, you allow yourself to consistently monitor and easily facilitate the official document during the contract lifecycle. An experienced and qualified contract administrator will ensure that all contracting parties are aware of the project’s progression. This includes notifying them about any shortcomings of a contracted party as well as problems that may halt project progress.
3. Automate as Much as Possible
Using a contract management software, you should automatically send out invoices online. If payments to you are made by credit card, you can integrate this into your system so that the software will automatically mark the invoice as paid when payers input their credit card information. Moreover, you should use the software to generate invoice reminders automatically. By doing this, you will avoid having to keep track of outstanding invoices and the system will do the follow-up for you.
By automating manual processes, you can free up your management and legal team for parts of the contract where their expertise is highly desired. Additionally, automation allows you to overcome inefficiency including minimizing errors, increasing process control and speeding up the cycle time of the contract.
4. Set Up a Standard Contracts with Variable Fields That Can Be Automatically Filled In
If you wish to track your maintenance contracts easily then make sure your contract doesn’t change much from client to client. The only thing that should change is the details of the client. By using software where you can automatically fill these variable fields based on the information already in the file of the client, you will make the aforementioned-task simple for yourself. This will lead to efficiencies in contracting that ensure a well-structured contract process. These efficiencies include lower administration costs, faster contact cycle times, and increased capabilities for off-site administration.
5. Use A Cloud-Based Contract Management Solution
While managing electronically stored contracts is far easier than managing paper-based contracts, you cannot compare them to the contracts in the cloud. Using a cloud-based contract management solution is probably the most effective way to manage and keep track of maintenance contracts. With this solution, you can easily track changes during the contract lifecycle. By creating a single space accessible to both parties and eliminating the need for emails and additional reviewing, cloud-based contract management makes things incredibly simple.
There you have it—the 5 ways you can keep track of maintenance contracts. One thing that is constant in all 5 ways is the use of technology. To know more about how technology can make contract management easier, get in touch with us today!
by Bobby J Davidson
We love our company and we love what we do. Check out the ‘Why Percento‘ page to learn more: Love of Technology and Business! As the President of Percento Technologies International, I provide day-to-day leadership to the company’s senior management and I am personally involved in the strategy, business development and sales activities of the firm.
The company was founded in 1999 with the purpose of providing a one call source for organizations in need of Enterprise IT Consulting and Management. We also provide a line of products in the boutique Cloud Server space with a touch of high-end website strategy consulting and design services. We personalizes the IT Service experience with a team approach, working with clients from diverse sectors of industry, including energy services, financial, legal, entertainment, healthcare, hospitality, retail and general and/or corporate business. percentotech.com/contact