Context

Contractor Management

Contractors have been rising in usage across industries over the past 20 years. Depending on your organization, you may consistently use the same contractors and need to redraft agreements and documents at the start of every new project. For large projects with many contractors, juggling different contacts with contractor-specific information can become difficult to manage and resource-intensive.

Symphona can help automate various aspects of contract management like contract generation and invoice processing, helping you better manage your resources when working with your contractors. 

Specific issues within contract management include the following: 

Invoice Processing Issues

Invoices are often processed manually (either partially or fully) and involve reviews and approvals across company departments. The average small-to-medium-sized organization takes 25 days to handle a single invoice manually from receipt to payment, leading to late payments, more processing fees, missed pre-payment discounts, and a slew of other problems. Manual processes are also susceptible to human errors at any point.

Contract Generation Problems

Generating a simple, one-page agreement may take a few days to prepare, whereas a large one may take weeks or even months. For organizations using contract workers at volume, drafting individual contracts from scratch is often a resource-intensive and repetitive task, even with templates. Writing, reviewing, editing, and communicating agreements with internal and external parties result in significant administrative time.

Automation Technologies and Contractor Management

Invoices, on average, cost $12-$30 to process manually. By automating invoice processing pipelines, companies lower processing costs by 40%+. Automatically scanning invoices received from contractors, adding records to relationship management systems, and sending them for payment and bookkeeping lead to significant cost reduction.

Drafting contracts can take hours, days, or even months based on term complexities and negotiations. Automation solutions can help with commonly issued agreements, directly accessing data stored in contractor profile databases and automatically sending them for review internally and externally.

Organizations commonly use robotic process automation (RPA), workflow automation, and optical character recognition (OCR) to achieve these automation solutions.

Solution

How Symphona Helps

Symphona Flow and Resolve are perfect candidates to automate contractor management processes. Symphona tools are no-code, allowing for people of any technical skill to use them. Furthermore, with Symphona operating on a usage-based system, your organization only pays based on how many automations you use.

Symphona can help in three ways:

Symphona for Contractor Database Management

One possible automation solution for contractor management is to implement a database of profiles for past and present contractors, storing data in either Flow or a third-party CRM provider. 

This database would stay current automatically by scanning proposals, contracts, documents, and more with OCR and generating new contractor profiles. These profiles would help organize and route documents, contractor communications, and agreements while providing a centralized data source with any information needed to help evaluate performance and fit for future projects. To aid organizations with large numbers of contractors, workflow automation, RPA, and OCR can generate database indexes to help teams search for entries by keywords.

These automation technologies can also generate metrics and reports automatically to allow for better decision-making, ranging from profit margins to historical contractor performance.

Symphona for Contract Generation, Review & Signing

Flow and Resolve can automate the entire contract generation, review, and signing process. 

Your organization can use Flow to create workflows that generate contracts using defined templates and data from contractor profiles, including names, addresses, duration, and terms. After contract generation, they are sent to internal staff for review and later to contractors for any amendments. If the contractor requests amendments, they can be parsed and summarized for staff to review, edit, and accept. 

Once both parties agree on a final contract, digital signatures can be collected, with signed documents securely stored for record keeping. Applying this or a similar workflow automation solution for contract generation, review, and signing can result in 60%+ less processing time and costs.

Symphona For Contractor Invoicing

Automating invoicing processes can reduce invoice to payment turnaround times by up to 85%. By automating the tedious and repetitive steps, like invoice receipt, bookkeeping/accounting, and payment, staff only needs to review critical operations. SimplyAsk Flow [link to flow] and Resolve [Link to Resolve] enable organizations to implement advanced invoice processing automation.

Regardless of the file type, format, or graphical design, workflow automation with OCR technology can parse received contractor invoices to identify the address, company name, phone number, email, items, tax codes, amount, invoice no., payment terms, and more. Contracts that meet defined criteria can be flagged for detailed manual review and tracked within SimplyAsk Resolve [Link to Resolve]. If any information is missing, workflows can automatically contact contractors to acquire missing information.

Depending on company policies, invoices may need to be approved by multiple departments. You can design workflows with Flow to arrange this approval process by providing dashboards to enable staff to identify what approvals remain before payment and reports to help locate operational bottlenecks. 

Following the invoice approval process, automated workflows can transfer agreement data to bookkeeping/accounting software, including Xero, Intuit Quickbooks, Netsuite ERP/SRP, Finsync, and SAP ERP, link them in contractor databases / CRMs, and issue the payment.