AI-Enhanced Smart Upload Streamlines Contract Management
Let’s talk about contract management.
Best case scenario: a long and arduous process that results in a legally binding agreement that is properly documented and set up for future actions.
Worst case scenario: an even longer and more arduous process filled with errors due to manual and inefficient contract workflows.
While the first scenario may result in inconvenience and wasted time, the latter creates massive blindspots often leading to missed payment deadlines, reconciliation issues, and untapped savings opportunities with vendors.
“Many medium-sized businesses deal with hundreds of contracts annually and most of those contracts are recorded manually,” said Josh Cronk, Senior Manager, Product Marketing at Procurify. “These inefficiencies and visibility gaps have been the unfortunate reality of the post-signature process even after the move towards digitization. But the recent emergence of AI has unlocked the ability for us to build this smart upload feature and help our customers move faster than ever.”
Built into Procurify’s existing Contract Management module, our smart upload feature grants users efficiency and accuracy in their post-signature contract management process. The feature’s built-in AI technology conquers complex tasks such as:
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Instantly and accurately extracting contract details
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Bulk processing of contracts
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Maintaining detailed and accurate records
“Our goal is to reduce the friction in adding contracts into Procurify, enhancing the usability of our entire Contract Management module and eliminating the need for manual data entry,” said Amrit Saggu, Senior Product Manager at Procurify.
Procurify users leveraging smart upload in their Contract Management workflows will benefit from:
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Enhanced efficiency: Save hours of manual data entry by automatically extracting contract details
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Spend data accuracy: Reduce errors with precise AI extraction, ensuring contract details are correctly populated
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Workflows that are built to scale: Easily manage large volumes of contracts with bulk upload and processing capabilities
Fueled by AI
Procurify’s AI-enhanced functionality overcomes traditional challenges associated with optical character recognition (OCR) technology.
OCR is common for contract management software but the accuracy is unreliable and the capabilities are limited. Interpreting dates would be an example of the technology’s shortcomings. OCR would simply recognize and convert text like ‘01/15/2024’ into machine-readable format and it might struggle with variations like ‘January 15th, 2024’ or ‘15 Jan 2024.’
“OCR cannot determine if it’s a start date, end date, or another type of date, while AI can interpret that from the language used in the contract,” explained Saggu. “AI can even infer dates from contextual clues like ‘30 days from the effective date.’”
The smart upload feature uses powerful generative technology to intelligently extract data without relying on assumptions.
The technology can effectively:
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Pick up on synonyms or different terminology used in contracts
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Match vendors extracted from the contracts (including reading logos) to vendors in the system
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Notify users if there is not a match, providing the user with a quick link to select an existing vendor or create/request a new vendor
AI will simplify and speed up the post-signature contract management process including:
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Maintaining contract records
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Reminders on contract renewals
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Tracking spend against contracts
Saving time and clicks
Saggu estimates that a user could spend between 5-10 minutes uploading and double-checking information from a single contract using basic OCR technology or manually inputting fields.
“You’re having to go through each paragraph in a contract to fill in every field,” she said. “That is at least one click per field multiplied by another 10 or so fields in order to make sure all the information is correct before submitting it.”
Smart upload transforms a manual, long, error-prone process of adding contracts into an efficient, user-friendly, and accurate experience.
“Contract creation and management have never been this seamless,” said Saggu. “If the AI is not 100 percent confident in an extracted field, you can review and fix it with a single click. In the end, you are saving time and clicks.”
Procurify will continue to explore generative AI opportunities in its Contract Management module and throughout its comprehensive procure-to-pay platform.
“Procurify’s Contract Management module seamlessly connects contracts to all aspects of spend management,” concluded Cronk. “The addition of AI-enhanced smart upload unlocks a lot more value for our customers using that module.”
Unlock the power of Procurify’s AI-enhanced smart upload
Part of Procurify’s comprehensive Contract Management module, find out how the smart upload feature leverages AI to streamline the contract management process while saving time and reducing errors.
