Today, all businesses use contracts to formalize business relationships, conduct financial transactions, and guarantee the purchase, sale, and delivery of goods and services. If you work in a contract-heavy industry such as law, banking, or insurance, it may seem like negotiating, creating, approving, and signing contracts is all you do! That’s because, until very recently, contract generation and management were time-consuming and labor-intensive manual processes. Fortunately, there’s a better way to create the contracts your business requires — automatic contract generation software.

What is contract generation?

Contract generation is simply the process of gathering and assembling all the data and information you need to create a legally binding business contract. This includes receiving a contract request, gathering all necessary information, writing the contract, formatting the document, and sending the finished product off for review, approval, and signatures.

Manual contract generation requires a lot of time and attention to detail, but much of the process is repetitive — making it a prime candidate for automation. Automated contract generation is one of the most common applications of document automation software. Simplifying contract generation is especially beneficial for law practices, insurance agencies, banks, mortgage lenders, and other companies creating multiple contracts daily.

How does the automated contract generation process work?

When it’s time for a new contract, your contract automation software guides you through a series of steps to gather all the information you need. You’ll be prompted to enter names, dates, addresses, dollar amounts, and other data and to select pre-written clauses to fit your situation. You can even integrate the software with other programs so you can pull in data automatically from your CRM database or other sources.

Once you’ve completed the prompts, often known as an “interview”, the contract generation software automatically populates the contract template and formats everything correctly. After that, you can use the software to send the document for approval or electronic signature or to download the forms in whatever format you choose.

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What are the benefits of contract generation software?

Below are the top 6 benefits of automated contact generation:

1. Streamlined Contract Creation & Approval Process

No more searching for the most current templates, copying and pasting information, or scrambling to keep up with contract versions and approvals. Your contract generation solution takes care of all that automatically and streamlines the entire process.

2. Major Time Savings

Manual contract generation often takes hours to create a single document. With the help of contract generation software, your team can create high-quality contracts in minutes. Just think of all the higher-value projects you and your team can work on in the time you used to spend formatting and creating contracts!

3. Fewer Errors & Less Compliance Risk

One of the biggest benefits of contract generation software is improved document quality. There’s no more copying and pasting and your data is automatically validated as you enter it — which drastically reduces common errors such as invalid addresses and dates and incorrect names. It also reduces your compliance risk by introducing standard templates to ensure you include all critical clauses, statements, and provisions.

4. Reduced Closing Expenses

Faster, more accurate contract generation results in lower expenses to execute and close deals. If your business creates a high volume of contracts, these cost reductions quickly add up to significant cost savings.

5. Vastly Improved Customer Experience

Customers today expect quick turnarounds and high-quality contracts. They have little patience for long waits or re-writes due to errors on your part. By speeding up your process and reducing errors, you can improve your customers’ experience and make sure you meet or exceed their high expectations.

6. Increased Capacity to Close Deals

Last but not least, automated contract generation enables you to create more contracts and close more deals without the need to immediately hire more staff or work overtime.

How to find the right contract generation solution for your business

If contract generation software sounds like the perfect tool to improve your efforts, it’s time to find a contract generation solution and get started! Good news — you have plenty of choices, but you may have to spend some time researching and evaluating different solutions to find the right fit for your needs.

To avoid getting overwhelmed, we suggest starting with HotDocs! With over a million customers in 60 countries, we’re an established leader in the world of document creation and automation — including contract generation. We offer contract generation solutions specifically built for the legal, insurance, banking, publishing, and government industries as well as other document creation products to help large and small businesses in any field.

Want to know more? Visit our industry services page to read about HotDocs use cases and see customer reviews and testimonials.