I was thinking, this morning, about our Legal and Supply Chain customers who have asked us about Contract Management and how to make use of policyIQ for monitoring and compliance. Then, I was thinking about how the tools and practices for monitoring typical contracts can really apply to all sorts of agreements.

Want more info on Contract Management?
We met for a CPE web session a couple of months ago to talk about the use of policyIQ for contract management.  (Click this link to see the video recording of the session.)  While we're talking this month about amplifying your use of policyIQ to take advantage of those features that demonstrate it is much more than a document repository, I thought I'd remind you of those actionable pieces of information that you can get to easily by using reports.

You've heard the saying: "Garbage in = garbage out."
In any case where we're highlighting the power of reporting, keep in mind that your reports are only as good as the information that you're tracking. You not only have to be capturing the information in order to be able to report on it, but some field types lend themselves to more reliable results than others. Use List fields (Drop down or multi-select) and give authors of your content a set of choices where possible. This eliminates the data integrity issues caused by misspellings, typographical errors, abbreviations and so on.  Date, currency, and whole number fields are okay, too. Text fields are the least reliable for reporting, but they certainly do have their place and usefulness. Just think critically about what you want to get out before you decide how to lead others to put information in!

What tasks are you responsible for that require you to track down information?
Consider the information that we're putting in and how this can be useful for producing actionable report results for all types of audiences tracking and monitoring contracts or agreements. Here's some food for thought:

Legal - monitoring all contracts: Build a Detail Page Report filtering for all pages created from all Contract or Agreement-related Templates. These Templates might have a Drop Down field that indicates the stage of the agreement (Proposal, In Negotiation, Active, Renewal Review/Re-negotiation, Expired) or you may choose to simply Delete expired contracts and agreements so that only active agreements are returned in your Report results.  (Remember that "Deleted" pages may be reported on if you choose to select the relative Stage filter and pages will continue to reside in your policyIQ site until they are "Permanently Deleted".)

Staffing Agreements - Report on Staffing Agreements (filter #1) with a specified End Date (filter #2) within your Department (filter #3) and be sure to include Compensation Amount as a field on the Template and within the Columns of your report to help you accurately budget resources for the upcoming quarter. Use filters to review all Staffing Agreements with an Employee Start Date in the coming 30 days so that you can ensure that they receive the appropriate New Hire Packet of paperwork.

Customer Agreements - Use filters to narrow down to your Customer Agreements and filter further to see only those with a Projected Annual Revenue over a specified dollar amount. This report will help your team to focus on your high priority customers.

Vendor Contracts - Narrow down one of your Vendor reports to those with Milestone Dates within the last 30 days and be sure to include the Deliverables or Commitments field, so that you can review and hold your vendors/suppliers accountable.

Partner Agreements - Report on Partner Agreements from a number of perspectives to 1) ensure that both parties are meeting the agreement, 2) prepare in plenty of time to renegotiate the agreement if necessary, and 3) Determine if you wish to renew the agreement upon the contract expiration date.

Maybe you already have agreements in policyIQ and are not sure how to construct the reports to get at the information that is most valuable to your team. Or, you might wonder how to build the Templates to most effectively capture the information that will lead to more streamlined management of your contracts and agreements. We have a number of people ready and waiting to troubleshoot and brainstorm with you. Give us a call: 1.866.753.1231. If you prefer, you can email us at support@policyIQ.com.