7 ways Sharepoint digitizes contract management in Dynamics 365

Contract management is an essential business process for any company that deals with agreements or service contracts. Without automated processes put in place, managing the full lifecycle of your contracts can be a time-consuming and costly process. SharePoint for Dynamics 365 offers contract management capabilities that allow you to automate, digitize, and streamline the contract creation and approval process. This blog post highlights seven effective ways that SharePoint facilitates Contract Management with Dynamics 365.

Using templates can simplify the contract creation process. SharePoint allows you to create and reuse templates for various contract types, offering a method of creating standard contracts easily and efficiently.

In SharePoint, all documents are stored in one centralized location, with storage available for up to 500 million documents. Custom views can be created to allow specific people or teams access to contracts in ways that make sense to their roles. All previous versions of a contract are also kept and stored within SharePoint and can be accessed by users at any point.

An important feature of SharePoint’s Contract Management capabilities is approval workflows. Workflows can be set up that route contracts to specified users for approval and notify them when it is finalized. The approval workflows can be as simple or complex as you need them, including capabilities such as scheduling alerts and notifications about a contract’s status.

Because of the Dynamics 365 integration, workflows can co-exist across the two systems. Dynamics 365 workflows can trigger SharePoint workflows and vice versa, letting you easily accomplish all tasks required during the lifecycle of a contract.

SharePoint has a powerful search filter that searches across all content data, including filtering by Dynamics 365 fields or metadata. These specified search results help you find exactly what you are looking for, no matter the detail level.

DocuSign is a 3rd party add-on available from the Dynamics 365 App Store. Once integrated, DocuSign can be used in approval workflows to securely send contracts for signature. The status of documents that have been sent can be tracked within SharePoint. The use of DocuSign rapidly hastens the approval process as it eliminates the need for emails or wet signatures. There is no need to create a separate DocuSign account to utilize DocuSign; you can leverage your existing SharePoint credentials.

SharePoint has an advanced security model for managing sensitive contract data that includes multifactor authentication, data encryption, and data loss prevention. It also provides audit trails of who viewed, modified, or deleted documents, which meets federal and state compliance regulations. For users that have licenses to Dynamics 365, security roles such as Document Sharing, and SharePoint are required to view and edit SharePoint documents directly within Dynamics 365. However, users without Dynamics 365 licenses can still access, view, and edit the same documents within SharePoint, and any changes made will sync across Dynamics 365 due to their integration. It is also worth noting that companies can set up security roles within SharePoint that restrict or allow users to access specific documents or parts of a document.

SharePoint is an ideal solution for Contract Management because it is built to have native integrations with Dynamics 365 as well as other Microsoft products such as Outlook and Azure. Rand Group has product expertise in both SharePoint and Dynamics 365 and other platforms on the Microsoft technology stack. That combined with years of experience working with clients and streamlining business processes makes us fully equipped to automate your contract management processes. Contact one of our team members today to get started with your contract automation journey.