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What Actually Is a Contract Template?
A contract template is a standardised template for an agreement that is filled with information from the contracting parties and used as a contract. Contract templates are predominantly used in business areas where the same agreement can be used for different situations and only needs minimal adaptation.
You will be surprised how the automation and digitalisation of what seems to be a tiny part of a time-consuming internal process (contract preparation) can lead to unexpectedly high savings on an unimagined scale.
With the one exception that all tenders in an organisation are extremely specific and individual, any organisation can use contract templates. The reasons for this are that the use of contract templates is undeniably quicker and more automated, leading to fewer errors.
Advantage 1: Access to more staff
With the help of elaborated contract templates, any employee can actually complete a contract, i.e. enter the missing contract partner-specific details (name, address, ...) and conclude a contract. Consequently, there is no longer any need to assign a highly qualified team just to draft the contract.
In this way, the processes of contract negotiation and drafting remain within the same team and there is no break, which tends to result in either important matters or details of the negotiation being lost because they have not been sufficiently and clearly discussed and coordinated with the drafting team.
Advantage 2: Reduction of a high error rate
Any task that has to be performed manually is already more prone to errors than an automated task. In addition, repetitive and monotonous tasks weaken concentration and the motivation to check for correctness several times is also limited.
With contracts, however, a small typing error can lead to significant problems and this can be counteracted by automation through contract templates. If the framework details and the text have already been created and only the really crucial information needs to be adjusted or entered, this reduces the risk of an error immensely.
Advantage 3: Faster closing of contracts
Contract templates produce more contracts and generate them faster. First of all, of course, the contract does not have to be created from scratch, and contracts can be page-long documents, which is a considerable amount of time. Furthermore, by using contract templates, collective data can be created in the long run, from which an error analysis can be implemented.
It can be identified which clauses may lead to much discussion among the contractual partners, or which ones have already caused a contract to fail, which are incomprehensible and should be reworded. Ultimately, through this practice, the contract templates can be continuously improved and updated in order to save even more time, conclude more contracts and increase the satisfaction of the contractual partners, which ultimately all indirectly leads to an increasing profit for one's own company.
Advantage 4: More efficient collaboration
Often old is well proven!
It is generally more efficient to commission a team once to create well thought-out and elaborated templates, which canthen be further developedover time with the help of error analysis.
Without the use of uniform contract templates, one would have to have each employee draw up his or her own contract before concluding it. In most cases, this results in a sloppy and hasty contract document due to time and resource constraints, which could have been avoided from the beginning.
The time saved by the one-off automation effort can then be spent by the employees on other valuable tasks and can therefore be used more sensibly.
Advantage 5: Maximised consistency
With prefabricated contract drafts, it is mandatory to comply with the company's typical standards. This eliminates the risk of employees incorporating their own version of the company's rules when drafting a contract manually because they understand them differently or are not familiar with them. In this way, a consistency of good quality contracts can be built up in the market. This consistency in turn leads to a good reputation for the company as a whole.
