Sachin Sharma, founder of ProcureDesk, walks through three ways to catch contract renewals before they sneak up on you: set an authorized signatory policy, establish a contract review process with timelines, and monitor renewals through a centralized repository with alerts.
Ever been surprised by surprise contract renewals or expenses or contracts that you don't know about, but they exist? If you have been surprised with contract renewals, then this video is for you. So in this video I'm going to break down three strategies that you can implement today to make sure that you don't have any surprise contract renewals and you have full visibility in terms of what your commitments are with different vendors. Right. And stick till the end. I'll share one simple tip that you can implement today to get controls over your contract renewals. If you're joining me for the first time, welcome. My name is Sachin Sharma. I am the founder of procuredesk, where we help growing companies control spend through procurement and AB automation. So let's jump right in. Strategy number one is setting up a authorized signatory process. So what do I mean by that? Most companies have surprise contract renewals because they don't have a policy on who can actually sign a contract. A CFO can sign a contract. A department owner can sign a contract. A VP can sign a contract. A manager can sign a contract. Who can actually sign a contract. So the first thing, if you have surprise renewals or contracts, that means people are just signing, signing up contracts without knowing that whether they can actually sign a contract or not. So set up an authorized signatory policy. That means, let's say it's simple process. Anything over 50,000. CFO can sign anything under between 10,000 and 50,000. A VP can sign anything under 10,000, you know, or maybe 5,000 to 10,000. A senior manager can sign anything on under 1,000, you don't need a contract. These are some simple tips or rules you can implement even today to get started with. So that's strategy number one. Strategy number two is having a process to enable people to submit a contract request. So if a, let's say marketing department wants to sign up a new data agreement with a third party to get, you know, information about prospects, they should have a process where they can submit a request for contract review. And then you should have like some sort of SLA where you can get back to them. Right. So a very simple tip would be just setting up a request process. You could use your existing procurement system or you could just set up a simple email form where they can just submit a request along with the contract and the justification on why they need a new contract. So that's number two. Number three is you need to set up proactive monitoring. So proactive monitoring here is making sure that you know when your contracts are up for renewal and you have enough opportunity to review them and decide whether you actually want to renew that contract or that product or services is not required anymore. Most of the time renewals happens automatically and the companies don't have the opportunity to react to it and decide whether they want the renewal or not. So if you set up proactive monitoring, you will know exactly what is coming up for renewal and you can decide proactively what you want to do about it. Now, a simple tip here would be setting up a simple contract repository where you store all your contracts in one single place. And most contract repositories allow you to set up notifications where you can set up like an advanced notification, let's say 90 days or 60 days. Whatever time you need to act on it, you can just set that up. So those are three simple strategies. Now regarding the one simple tip here is what I found very powerful in my personal experience is what I do is whenever there are large contracts that I'm signing at the same time I go to my calendar and set up a invite or event for me to renew it right? Or look for the renewal and so on. So that way I'm being proactive about the renewals and I don't have to worry about oh, I signed and I forgot about it, right? So that's simple tip you can implement even today without using any new system or anything like that. So just to summarize, here are the three simple strategies you can implement in your business today to make sure you don't have unwanted contract renewals. Number one is set up an authorized signatory process. Number two is have a process for employees to submit the request and number three is proactive monitoring. If you like this video, go hit the subscribe button so you get notified when we release videos like that. And thanks for joining me today and I'll see you in the next video.
