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Drafting, signing, and storing contracts has long been a largely manual process. Sure, most companies have their templates that they adjust according to each specific agreement with a client, but the adjusting, sending and storing of signed contracts is still done manually. Contractbook changes that, and in effect it reduces work that can take up to hours per contract to a process of just a few clicks.
So how does that work, drafting up entire contracts with just a few mouse clicks? To learn more we interviewed Alexander Irschenberger from Contractbook to tell us all about it.
What is contractbook, what is new about it, and what sets it apart from similar solutions?
Contractbook is a complete contract management software that you can use to handle and automate agreements of all shapes and sizes. By “unlocking the value of your contract data, we pride ourselves on creating loveable moments throughout the contract lifecycle” Alexander explains. In effect, your entire company can simply use one “single tool to create, track, sign, and connect legally valid contracts and archive them safely in one place” - and that’s unique to this date.
Who makes use of Contractbook and what problem(s) does it solve for them?
The platform is primarily used by creative Operations leaders who were frustrated with how contracts were handled before.
In the process of getting contracts accessible and actionable, Contractbook has ditched Word documents and PDF files, for they tend to get lost in (sub-)folders and emails. By centralizing everything on one platform, we have eliminated the issues of contracts getting lost or various versions of the same contract floating around.
How did the collaboration with XA come about?
The collaboration actually came about via OTYS, and ATS platform provider that was trying to facilitate an integration with Contractbook for its client ePunkt - the largest recruitment company in Austria. Just like many other businesses, ePunkt was struggling with contract handling that was completely isolated from the rest of its business process.
This caused various problems: the recruiters got frustrated with the tedious process of drafting contracts during which they had to switch between platforms all the time. As a result, they lost oversight, and started making mistakes and using the wrong templates. For the operations team of ePunkt, it was almost impossible to get a proper overview of the contracts (often they were stored somewhere in an email attachment), which made it impossible to do any meaningful analyses on their contract handling.
That’s why in 2021, ePunkt set out to streamline its sales process by integrating contract handling into their OTYS ATS system. However, every platform tested by ePunkt and OTYS came back with the same issue: once the contract was signed, the contract was locked in a PDF without any data on it. In effect, once the contract was signed, data synchronization became impossible.
So at that point OTYS introduced ePunkt to its long time partner XA Flow, to develop an integration with 2-way synchronization between OTYS and Contractbook.
How does the Contractbook-OTYS integration work and what does it facilitate?
ePunkt set out to solve 2 main issues with their contracts in the sales process:
- Keeping their recruiters in the driver's seat during the contract process
- Linking the data in their ATS to the data in the contract.
Via XA Flow, the Contractbook-OTYS integration facilitates the automatic drafting of contracts based on the ATS data. In effect, a recruiter simply has to click on “draft contract”, and Contractbook automatically selects the right template and populates it with the client data and candidate profile stored in OTYS. Subsequently, all the recruiter has to do is check the contract details and share it with the prospective client for signing by clicking on “send for signature”.
Throughout the process, all contract negotiations happen within Contractbook and, once the contract signed, all data syncs back to OTYS. In this, recruiters can simply stay within their OTYS environment, which automatically tracks the contract process, while the operations team can access and analyze the data in both their ATS and their contract platform.
What is the vision for the future?
In the future, we will expand the integration beyond the recruitment sales process. As a full service recruitment platform, ePunkt offers a variety of services within recruitment, including candidate negotiations. OTYS and Contractbook will work with XA Flow and ePunkt to make these negotiation processes fully automated as well.
Finally, ePunkt will expand the integration by including all the different contract types that they use, and centralize them all in Contractbook instead of individual PDFs dispersed over numerous (sub-)folders.