Contract Statuses

Contract Statuses   

Contract Status Planning for Your Contract Insight Application

The Contract Status table is usually used to document the stages of the contract life-cycle that your organization's contracts normally go through. With a new installation of Contract Insight, there are several out-of-the-box values provided for you as examples of how this table is recommended to be used. Please keep in mind that while the examples may represent many of the same status values that your organization may have and use, these values can always be edited and deleted if a change to the name of the Record Status is needed, or if the Status is not needed at all. Please see the Record Status Management Wiki page for more information about adding, editing, and deleting values in the Contract Status table.

Some Considerations:

1.  Contract Statuses are normally used to document the stage of the Contract Life-Cycle that the Contract Record is currently in.

First, consider your organization's usual process for a contract from beginning to end.  Next, determine whether any of those stages in the process can be combined.  For example, if you have several stages that read something like "Send to Vendor for Review", "Receive back from Vendor", "Make Contract Modifications", "Send Back to Vendor", etc., then you should consider possibly pairing down some of the stages into "Contract Modifications", "Vendor Review", and/or "In Negotiation".  

Always review your list of Statuses and think, "Is my team going to be able to manage this list?".  Meaning, is the list of statuses that you have prepared realistic?  Or is a member of your team going to need to log-in to Contract Insight every day in order to update the status of the Contract Record?  Remember that the reason for having a Contract Management System is to make your Contract Management process easier and more manageable, not harder and more complex.

2.  Contract Statuses can control whether Contract Record Alerts are sent out.

For each Status value that is listed in the Contract Status Table, you can specify whether you would like to allow e-mails to be sent out for that Contract Record if the Contract Record is set to that particular status. Contract Record Alerts that are automatically sent out may not be needed for some Contract Records (i.e. Evergreen Contracts), so you can have a Status that is called "Active- Non Alerting" with an "Allow E-mail" value of "No" or "False" so that the regular system generated alerts for a Contract Record will not be sent out for any contracts that are set to this Status.

Next Steps:

1.  Download and populate the 'Contract Statuses Planning' tab in the "InitialSetupTablePlanningSpreadsheets.xlsx" attached at the bottom of this screen.

2. Follow the instructions for implementing the finalized Contract Statuses list either on an individual value-by-value basis on the "Record Status Management" Documentation Wiki screen, or by using the instructions on the "Bulk Import Data" screen of the Documentation Wiki.