Small businesses often ignore the task of managing contracts. It’s boring and no where near as pressing as new sales or getting your product or operations into shape, right? Although it’s not a sexy place to be improving your business contract management and contract ops can have very real and very large impacts on your business as you grow and scale. The key areas where it gives improvements is to speed up your sales cycle, give customers a better buying experience, speeds up the time that a customer takes to pay you and cuts down on manual work later down the road. Not to mention it will help you massively when you’re looking to raise money for your business to grow. Managing contracts efficiently is extremely important for all of these things. Whether they know it or not a lot of small businesses are using contract management tools. From keeping track of agreements to ensuring compliance, contract management tools play a role in streamlining processes and minimizing risks. With a whole bunch of options available, choosing the right tool can be overwhelming. That’s why we’ve compiled a list of the top ten contract management tools for small business to help you navigate through the maze and find the perfect fit for your needs.
1. Contract Sent
Contract Sent has been specially built for small business with a price point starting at $7/month. It’s built to allow small businesses to start with off the shelf contract templates which they can edit and then use in the their business while managing their contract negotiations all the way through to signing. Contract Sent will also allow you to plug these details into ecosystem with integrations with Hubspot, Google Drive and Sharepoint. It’s a user-friendly interface is designed to simplify contract management. With features like document storage, search functionality, and tasks, it’s an ideal solution for small businesses getting up and running.
2. Trello
Trello, despite not being billed as a contract management platform is one of the most used tools to manage the contract negotiations of small businesses. Being simple to use, collaborative and with it’s kanban board structure this platform provides real-time collaboration, ability to assign tasks and manage stages of contract negotiation. Its intuitive design makes it easy for teams to create, communicate, and manage process efficiently. Most importantly for small business it can be used for free. Although it is not purpose it build so it does miss some use case specific features.
3. Sharepoint
Sharepoint is mostly known as a file repository and it fills out the space of contract management with exactly that. For businesses that work in the Microsoft suite of tools it is probably already in use. For this reason and the reason that it works so well with Microsoft Word (the home of any good lawyer) it is a very common tool for small businesses that can’t justify the spend on a legal ops specific tool.
Redline What Matters
Raise Changes For Approval To Turnaround Contracts Faster
4. Microsoft Planner Board
Similar to the way that Trello is used we’ve seen a lot of small businesses that use Microsoft Planner Boards to manage their contract negotiation process. The added value of the planner board is that it adds on to Sharepoint to give you a place to manage and track the process on top of your main contract repository. Again, the downfall of using this as your low cost version for managing contracts is that it doesn’t plug into the rest of your startups ecosystem and if you’d like to have a external lawyer work on things you need to set them up with a Microsoft login.
5. Monday.com
Monday.com is a leading tool for small business project management and with is a contract negotiation if not a mini project. This super useful tool is extremely flexible with multiple add on’s which will make life a lot easier for you. One of the difficulties of using something like Monday.com, ironically, is the flexibility. With so many different customizations it makes it hard to set up and maintain a solid operational process for your contracting.
6. IronClad
IronClad is the name that comes to mind as best in class for contract management. The main issue with that is that it comes with a best in class price tag. There’s a reason why when you go to their pricing page they don’t state what the pricing is. Small businesses often have very little budget for tools that aren’t adding to the improvement of the product or the growth of the sales side of the business which can mean that it’s a long time before a business will grow into needing or affording a tool like IronClad.
7. PandaDoc
PandaDoc, it’s one of our fav e-signature platforms. It offers a cloud-based contract management solution with features such as document generation, templates, and contract signing. Its seamless integration with Hubspot makes it easy to manage contracts from creation to signature. One thing it lacks is any function to manage the negotiation phase of contracting which means a lack of overview of where your contracts are and when they will get signed.
8. Docusign CLM
A signing and CLM combo. Docusign CLM is a great little tool. It allows you to generate contracts from data in CMS’s and set rules around redlining which is super useful. Docusign works on a per user pricing model which can very easily grow to be quite expensive for small businesses.
9. Google Drive
Google Drive, similar to the other contract storage options on the list is great for storing, organizing and giving access to all of your contracts. But like most of the others it relies heavily on your internal measures to have proper naming conventions and create parent and child folders to properly organize things which can very easily go wrong and make your contract storage disorganized.
Choosing the right contract management tool depends on various factors such as the size of your organization, specific requirements, and budget constraints. Whether you’re a small business looking for a simple solution or a large enterprise in need of advanced features, there’s a contract management tool out there to suit your needs.
By investing in the right contract management tool, you can streamline your processes, reduce administrative burden, and mitigate risks associated with contracts. With the top nine tools listed above, you’re well-equipped to take your contract management to the next level and drive efficiency across your organization.
