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Financial Contract Management: Leveraging Contract Data For Key Financial Reports

by | Sep 27, 2024

Financial contract management is more than just keeping tabs on agreements. Contracts are the blueprints of your financial commitments, revealing who owes what and when it’s due. With effective financial contract management, you turn those contracts into a powerful forecasting tool. You can track key dates, anticipate upcoming expenses, and even spot opportunities to negotiate better terms. Suddenly, contracts become a source of valuable insights, guiding you toward smarter financial decisions and steering your company toward long-term success.

No more surprise expenses or missed opportunities. With proactive financial contract management, you can anticipate future expenses and make informed choices about where to allocate your resources. 

Financial Reporting Data Buried in Vendor Contracts

Imagine having a clear view of all your upcoming payments and key contract dates right at your fingertips. No more scrambling to find invoices or manually tracking renewal dates in spreadsheets. With financial contract management software, like FinQuery Contract Management, you can use AI capabilities to automatically extract payment dates, payment schedules and amounts directly from your vendor contracts. This streamlines both your strategic forecasting and daily operations, enabling you to quickly and easily generate accurate reports.

Key Financial Reports Enabled by Financial Contract Management Software

Financial contract management software allows you to easily generate a variety of key financial reports that provide a multi-dimensional view of your financial landscape. You can analyze contract data across different time frames for insights into a particular period. This flexibility empowers you to make informed decisions by providing a thorough understanding of your financial obligations across various time horizons. Financial contract management software enables users to generate various reports including:

Month-to-Date (MTD):

  • What it is: MTD reports reflect the performance or activity of any contract agreements from the beginning of the current month to the present day.
  • Why it matters: MTD reports offer a snapshot of current performance, enabling the early identification of trends, potential issues, or areas of success. This allows for agile decision-making and course correction if necessary.

Quarter-to-Date (QTD):

  • What it is: QTD reports measure performance or activity from the beginning of the current quarter to the present day.
  • Why it matters: QTD reports provide a broader perspective than MTD, helping to assess progress toward quarterly goals. This is crucial for understanding the overall trajectory and making informed decisions regarding resource allocation and strategy.

Year-to-Date (YTD):

  • What it is: YTD reports track performance or activity from the beginning of the current year up to the present day.
  • Why it matters: YTD reports are a critical indicator of overall annual performance. They enable the comparison of current performance to previous years, identification of long-term trends, and planning for the future.

Next Twelve Months (NTM):

  • What it is: NTM reports forecast performance or activity for the upcoming twelve months.
  • Why it matters: NTM reports allow for the anticipation of future revenue, expenses, and cash flow. This forward-looking perspective is invaluable for budgeting, planning, and making strategic decisions that position a business for success.

Trailing Twelve Months (TTM):

  • What it is: TTM reports measure performance or activity for the past twelve months, regardless of the current calendar year.
  • Why it matters: TTM reports offer a continuous snapshot of a business’s performance, making them valuable for identifying seasonal trends and assessing performance over a designated timeframe, regardless of alignment with the calendar year.

Year-over-Year (Y/Y):

  • What it is: Y/Y reports compare performance or activity for a specific period in the current year to the same period in the previous year.
  • Why it matters: Y/Y reports are crucial for assessing a business’s growth trajectory and overall health, as they track progress, pinpoint areas for improvement, and benchmark performance against industry standards.

Beyond streamlining reporting and forecasting, financial contract management software gives you the power to:

  • Eliminate surprise contract renewals: Ever been surprised by an auto-renewing contract? Financial contract management software alerts you to upcoming renewals, allowing you to evaluate options and decide whether to renew, renegotiate, or switch vendors. This system helps you avoid unwanted auto-renewals and take control of your agreements.
  • Spot discrepancies within a contract: If you’ve faced unexpected invoices or hidden charges, financial contract management software can help. It extracts payment schedules and amounts from your contracts, providing clarity on your financial obligations. This enables effective budgeting, identifies potential savings, and improves forecasting, ensuring your company’s financial health stays strong.

Summary

Financial contract management is far more than just staying organized—it’s about tapping the hidden power within your contracts to steer your company towards financial success. By proactively managing your agreements, you gain invaluable foresight, transforming potential pitfalls into opportunities for growth.

Remember, those contracts aren’t just legal documents; they’re a goldmine of financial data. With the right tools, you can extract critical information like payment schedules and renewal dates, empowering you to create accurate forecasts, identify cost-saving opportunities, and make informed decisions.

The ability to generate dynamic financial reports across various timeframes—MTD, QTD, YTD, NTM, TTM, and Y/Y—provides a 360-degree view of your financial landscape. This level of insight allows for proactive planning, strategic decision-making, and a healthier bottom line.

Don’t let valuable contract data remain buried and underutilized. Explore contract management solutions that can automate and streamline the process of extracting data and generating reports, empowering your finance team to become true strategic partners in your company’s success.

CFO Starter Guide to Contract and Spend Intelligence