Finalize contracts faster with airSlate

Contract negotiation is the process that involves a certain level of give-and-take aimed at reaching a mutual agreement over the preliminary points laid out in a contract’s draft. Depending on the scope of the contract, negotiations can be broken down into multiple stages and, overall, take somewhere between one week to a few months. Contract negotiations are an essential part of a business’s strategy. They are vital, especially for businesses that depend on long-term relationships with partners and strive to avoid win-lose situations.

It’s a specific category of software that serves to streamline and organize the negotiation process by automating the routine side of contract management and minimizing human input. It also provides an all-in-one document-centric place for coordinating and tracking a document’s flow from start to execution. Every negotiation software usually includes electronic signatures, workflow automation, and document generation; everything that concerns data intake and movement.

airSlate offers numerous possibilities for creating a specific contract negotiation Flow from scratch or based on a professional pre-made Flow template. In airSlate terms, a Flow is a document or documents that you generate or upload and customize by adding fillable fields, setting up Automation and Integration Bots, adding features like payments and attachment requests, etc. Once a Flow is triggered, the system creates a copy of the Flow, called a Slate, that follows all the setup settings found and configured in the Flow template.

When setting up a Flow, you can select from multiple document types. For the negotiation of a contract, choose the Contract and Agreement tab. All changes made to a document are tracked and highlighted along the way. After the first revision of your contract, you can start collaborating on documents by suggesting, accepting, or refusing the changes made to them. As soon as all parties involved agree to the contract’s terms, you can send it out to counterparties and request them to sign it.

airSlate is a multi-cloud solution that has everything to facilitate the contract negotiation process for parties on both executing sides. It features a powerful workflow and document generation tool, integrates with hundreds of other solutions allowing for the pulling and pushing of data, works with various document formats, and operates natively with Bots. What is more, airSlate provides endless opportunities for contract negotiations and contract redlining through the track changes option. Also, unlike other solutions, airSlate doesn’t charge per document. Finally, it remains compliant with all major standards concerning data protection and e-commerce.

A Tag is a combination of symbols that will help you create and structure a specific fillable field in your document. The most used fillable fields are Signature, Text, Currency, etc. You can either use our Document creator to preset the fillable fields or add them to your existing document before uploading. The system will recognize them automatically. This way, you will bring more flexibility and efficiency to your contract workflow.

When negotiating contracts, you can set limits on what each user can and can’t do on a document. To restrict or expand the permission rights for a specific user, go to the Flow Settings. Select Roles and click on the gear icon. In the Manage field permissions tab, choose a suitable option from the drop-down list, and click Apply changes. You can also use the Additional options section to define who can finalize the contract.

Flow setup is the starting point of contract negotiation. You can customize an existing, pre-uploaded Flow or create one from scratch. While configuring your Flow, you can add documents along with fillable fields, assign roles, define access rights, automate routine tasks (like data transfers or reminders) using Bots, and logically connect them to each step of your contract execution workflow. If you didn’t assign or forgot to assign roles at the beginning of Flow setup, you could do so after applying all the needed settings. The contract workflow is up and running and ready for the next stage – negotiation.

The negotiation process can differ based on the complexity and preset conditions. Let’s review a simple example of the process in airSlate. Once you’ve finalized the Flow setup, the assigned parties receive the document(s). Based on the permission rights you assigned for each role, they review the contract and make suggestions accordingly. Those on the other side of the negotiation process, in turn, decline or accept the suggestions. As soon as all the details are ironed out, and the contract is ready for signing, the chosen parties can eSign and finalize the contract negotiation process.

The legal validity of any electronic signature varies from one country to another and might even depend on local and federal laws. Conformity with leading standards like ESIGN, UETA, and eIDAS makes eSignature legally valid in the USA and in most European countries. In addition to that, features like an audit trail, multi-step authentication, and tamper-proofing make eSignature an even more secure way of certifying documents. airSlate offers all the features mentioned above and full compliance with the world-leading e-commerce standards. That’s why you can stay reassured while initiating contract negotiations in airSlate.

Besides staying in the loop while negotiating contracts, airSlate makes sure you don’t miss deadlines and renew contracts on time. You can set up reminder Bots that will help you remember to renew contracts as they approach their renewal or expiration dates. Bots follow if-this-then-that conditional logic that triggers them. Besides, they are easy to set up and don’t require specific knowledge of programming languages or frameworks.

airSlate is designed to delegate all routine tasks to an intelligently made platform built around automating industry-specific and document-heavy business processes. It makes any business workflow the way it should be: flexible, cost-efficient, error- and paper-free. Using airSlate, a contract negotiation software, you will get a higher level of accuracy, more streamlined workflows, and increased visibility across every point of document execution. You can see the complete set of capabilities airSlate has to offer in action by setting up a free account and signing up for self-paced airSlate Academy courses.