Business case: contract management software
Prepared for: Example figures
Date:
1. Summary
2. The problem today
3. The numbers
Value of recovered capacity, less licence cost
First-year position:
How that figure is reached
Where the recovered time sits
4. The cost of doing nothing
Deferring this is a decision with a price, and the price is not zero. Four things continue if nothing changes. None of them is an addition to the time saving in section 3, and none should be added to it.
Renewals that pass by default
Questions we cannot currently answer quickly
The test is not whether the documents exist. It is whether we can produce, within a working day, every contract containing a given clause, every agreement with a specific counterparty, and every obligation falling due this quarter. If the answer is no today, it is no during an audit, a due diligence process or a dispute, when the deadline is set by someone else.
Value leaving quietly
Entitlements bought and never used. Price escalators applied on schedule and never questioned. Volume discounts earned and never claimed. Two teams paying for overlapping tools because neither could see the other's contract. None of this appears as a loss in any report, which is precisely why it persists.
Capacity spent on administration
5. What adoption actually looks like
Realistic sequence, with the effort this requires from us rather than from the vendor.
Weeks 1 to 2: setup and templates
Account configuration, user and permission structure, and the three to five agreement types we issue most often turned into templates. Effort on our side: roughly two to three person-days, mostly from whoever owns the current templates.
Weeks 3 to 4: bring in the existing contract base
Import existing agreements and extract key dates, parties and terms so the back catalogue becomes searchable rather than only new contracts. Effort on our side: collecting the files. This is the step that pays for the renewals argument above.
Weeks 5 to 8: first workflows live
One agreement type end to end: draft, review, approve, sign. Start with the highest-volume, lowest-risk type so the process is proven before the difficult contracts arrive. Effort on our side: one owner, part time.
Ongoing: renewals and obligations
Deadlines, notice periods and obligations tracked automatically, with owners assigned. This is the part that keeps returning value after the initial rollout attention fades.
6. Questions this will raise
Can this wait for the next budget cycle?
These savings are soft. They do not show up as cash.
That is correct, and this case should not pretend otherwise. Recovered hours are capacity, not a line in the P&L. What is cash is the renewal we do not miss, the escalator we question, and the tool we do not pay for twice. The hours figure is here to size the problem, not to be banked.
7. Assumptions
Every figure above comes from these. Change any of them and the case changes with them.
