Agreement Desk: Accelerate Intake, Review, and Finalization of Agreements

Creating new business agreements can be cumbersome and time-consuming. Those who manage the process are often drowning in an inbox full of requests and struggling to keep track of the latest versions, statuses, and updates. This results in slow contract processes that keep businesses from moving quickly and frustrate everyone involved.

The chaos of disjointed agreement management comes at a real and tangible cost: the company’s time and money. The National Contract Management Association says B2B organizations take, on average, four to six weeks to create new agreements. And the standard agreement goes through more than three rounds of revisions, at an average development cost of $1,700. 

Manual agreement processes slow everything down, from onboarding new vendors to kicking off strategic projects to closing sales deals, ultimately delaying revenue. 

That’s why we’re excited to introduce Docusign Agreement Desk, a collaborative hub designed to streamline the intake, review, and finalization of agreements, empowering procurement, legal, and sales teams to get things done more quickly. 

Here’s how Agreement Desk helps contracts move from request to signature faster than ever. 

Simplified intake for agreement requests

Even when a formal agreement process exists, poor visibility into the status of requests often drives people to use unofficial channels, which further reduces transparency and scalability. 

Agreement Desk streamlines the intake process, making it easy for anyone to initiate an agreement request by email. That email becomes a trackable task on the Agreement Desk dashboard, and an AI contract agent guides the next steps. The agent analyzes the request and then suggests the best form to use, even prepopulating it with data. No more frustrating back-and-forth emails for gathering the relevant information. 

Agreement Desk also takes the legwork out of tracking details—all activities are logged in the activity feed, and key stakeholders have easy access to an agreement’s status, owners, and other critical information. That means they can spend less of their time on status updates and more of it on moving an agreement across the finish line.

Streamlined and centralized collaboration

Tracking changes across multiple stakeholders and review cycles is tricky and can result in delays. Imagine how much more efficient the agreement process would be if all parties and stakeholders were to redline, comment on, and edit a contract in the same place. Agreement Desk makes this possible with centralized redlining, version control, and other collaboration tools. 

Work together from start to finish to close a deal, with everything organized in a central location. As the process moves along, stakeholders can add and view details, including status, owners, documents, approvals, and messages, to keep everyone on the same page.

Accelerate with AI and automation

There are countless reasons deals stall, and the cost to revenue and relationships can be substantial. Agreement delays not only caused 21% of revenue to be deferred to the next reporting period, and 48% of businesses said their customer relationships deteriorated significantly because of agreement delays. That’s a hard pill to swallow, so keeping the agreement moving forward is paramount.

Another reason Agreement Desk is a great addition to everyday agreement work: It leverages AI and automation to speed up tasks and reduce manual effort throughout the entire agreement management process.

For example, AI-Assisted Review automates contract review, using AI to compare agreements against an organization’s preapproved playbook and then redlining to bring terms into compliance. And with Maestro, it’s easy to build and deploy automated workflows that accelerate agreement processes—without having to write code. 

Enhance visibility

Struggling to get a timely update on the status of an agreement: It’s practically an inevitable reality of agreement management, but Agreement Desk helps give everyone involved—especially the key stakeholders—total visibility into how in-flight agreements are progressing. 

Just a few clicks bring up all the key information, like status updates, due dates, and the latest revisions. Agreement Desk’s dashboards and reporting capabilities give you a bird’s-eye view of all your agreements as well as a zoomed-in look at individual details and statuses.

Agreement Desk: The future of agreements is here

Agreement Desk gives teams the structure and visibility they need to work more efficiently and get agreements ready for signature faster than ever. 

Agreement Desk is now available to U.S. Docusign IAM customers on select plans. For more information, reach out to your account team.