A contract validates business relationships and clears out confusions between the partners about terms and conditions. As a crucial part of the business, this has to be done professionally and systematically. However, contracts can be of any patterns and various workflows, but mostly, it involves a series of actions depending on the nature of the company. The property management business is no exception to that. Since property management is likely to have a slew of crucial information, its contracts tend to be complex and require more careful handling.
Suppose you are in a property management business. One of the fundamental aspects of your back-office (i.e. operation) is to prepare and process the contract for your clients. But to execute it, your contracts need the interference of multiple touchpoints between three stakeholders, such as the senior manager, project manager (team leader), and property manager.
After that, you need to collect a lot of information about your clients and the property to document them in the contract and subsequently store them in a platform where it is accessible, collaborative and secure based on the organisation’s hierarchy.
Due to its complexity, property managers find it challenging to execute the process. Handling all the documents and keeping them accessible to everyone involved at the same time is what inspiring digital contracts more often than ever. But preparing and forwarding the contracts manually while supervising the signing process introduces another challenge of disrupted communication and often results in inefficiency and human errors.
Like any company, your business’s main challenge is how to merge all this data into a contract using various templates and get them digitally signed off by stakeholders and/0r clients. With a reliable and dynamic solution, you can easily streamline your contract signing and managing process all while preserving the integrity of business relationships. But how to do that?
Don’t worry; we will discuss them in this property management case study in a moment.
Challenge
To get a better picture of the above process, let’s visualise the flow so we can get a better understanding:
By looking at the process flow, it becomes evident that there are multiple functions associated with contract processing. And it cannot be done using only one application.
So, the first challenge would be to handle multiple applications for a single purpose. Secondly, you must collaborate with different entities to validate a single document (Contract) that requires a long process and multiple touchpoints. Thirdly, documenting every stage of the process may require extra resources and additional expenditure. Lastly, following the process manually through various applications may pose the risk of miscommunication and delayed action. The whole process can easily be handled by Zoho implementation services which you will find below.
For further clarification, let’s use an example.
Suppose, you have acquired some new leads for your property business. Thanks to your marketing team for all the efforts. Now it’s your turn to secure the deals by signing contracts— sooner is better. So, you must adopt an efficient way to reach everyone involved and make the contracts accessible to them within a standard timeframe; preferably at the same time.
Now, in scenario 1:
If you are to compose the document manually and in a paper-based format, what to expect? Starting from noting down the client’s info in the contract to sending it back and forth to the stakeholders and decision-makers, you have to push yourself to the limit to do it timely. And you cannot deny the risk of delay for any unwanted situation i.e. flaws in the information, procrastination of your staff, and stakeholder’s inability to join in that particular moment. So, the challenges here are taking timely actions, avoiding human errors, and getting everyone involved at your convenience.
Scenario 2:
You are smart and have switched to virtual media like email to pass the information. So, you prepare the contract file by collecting the required info from the source in one application, attaching it to the email, and sending it to the stakeholders and associates. Now they look into it, download and edit the file with their signature, reupload the signed document and let you know via another email. Not to mention the number of times you may have to give them reminders to process the document appropriately and maintain confidentiality followed by an authoritative hierarchy while signing. Once every stakeholder completes his part, you keep it in a secure place. If you look closely, the process is quite inefficient and there are risks of data manipulations. So, following this procedure is a challenge that property managers may have to go through when signing a contract with the client.
To sum up,
The challenges property businesses usually face during handling a contract are including but not limited to inefficiency in time management, data management, miscommunication between the stakeholders, human error, transparency, confidentiality, use of multiple applications for a single purpose, and keeping it in a secure place while making it accessible to everyone involved.
It’s not too hard to figure out that this process is repetitive for all the clients under your property management scheme. Not only that, but you also require constant monitoring of the new contract every time a client is onboarded.
Besides, this process can take up most of your business hours and will further require more recruitment of sales reps to tackle the continuity of the contract handling process. This strangled the overall growth of your company owing to excess time and costs incurred from it.
Therefore, you can increase the efficiency by automating the overall contract handling method by merging all of the individual software through API. Remember, there are separate software and tools for contract creation, signature handling and the successful storage of the contract. From integrating all the apps under one Zoho ecosystem to applying specific contract creation rules, OscilloSoft is the all-time reliance to help you bring your vision to fruition through Zoho integrations.
How about OscilloSoft resolving all of the above challenges using a unified Zoho ecosystem? Are you making the most out of your Zoho One investment? Let us show you how you can harness all the Zoho apps to solve all your complex business rules with automation. Our team of expert Zoho Consultants can provide and implement a robust solution for your business.
Solution
From creating the contract to signing off with the stakeholders’ signatures and keeping them safe in the system for a quick search-through, the contract handler processing will need to undergo a series of processes. More often than not, this process of creating the contract in a system and keeping track of them amidst a growing number of parties and data gets pretty overwhelming. Besides, what seems to aggravate the most is the silos in software management which lack transparency and don’t cooperate with each other to manage the overall contract management flow for property management enterprise.
Applications in Scope
Since we are specialised Zoho Consultants it makes sense to use case Zoho integrations to solve and prepare the above construction project management case study.
Zoho CRM
Where we can capture and process the lead followed by converting it into a client /account. This tool streamlines the workflow by nurturing the leads and converting them into deals while giving real-time notifications when engaging with the clients.
Zoho Writer
To create various documents and templates and be able to merge values from the CRM. Zoho Writer creates merge-templates for the contracts, drags all the relevant information of the clients from deals, leads, and contacts into the documents, and mail merges them to the clients for securing the signatures.
Zoho Sign
Digital Sign tool for all the signs off between stakeholders and/or clients. Zoho Sign collects the signatures from multiple stakeholders, as well as clients to send them back to the CRM for confirmation.
Your property management industry requires a tactic in handling the entirety of the property management contracts without jeopardising the functionality and security of the software. So, you need to take nothing but the most comprehensive approach to the problems.
Since they worked independently as of then, our approach for this case study of property management would be to leverage the API to connect all of the three Zoho applications to work under one roof in unison. These combined Zoho integrations would streamline the overall process, thus formulating the smooth transition from one task to another. Upon using our customised API, the clients’ contract handling system would pick up the following improvement —
- Zoho CRM can be used to create the contracts using the merge-templates within a particular layout called the Contract Agreement Layout. Within the model layout, clients can store the custom contract data in the custom record field, for example, contract term, monthly cost, contact name and address, etc. This CRM also helped document all the information and data of the clients to use in the new contract form.
- Zoho Writer will enable us to use its existing or new templates to successfully structure the contracts into a proper format. Its mail-merging feature pre-populated the field within the document by extracting the clients’ data from Zoho CRM’s deals module.
N.B. You can also opt for the Template Conditional Logic within the Zoho writer. By applying the Conditional Logic, you can determine whether to show or hide certain sections or texts based on a set of variables from the contract during the merging process. This will come into effect in the final output.
- Zoho Sign will receive the contract for obtaining the signatures from the stakeholders and the clients. The integration between these two plugins will make it possible for the Zoho writer to send the contract document to the respective signees and to get the Zoho Sign to handle the overall signing procedure.
Result
Upon completing the signing, Zoho Sign validates the signatures and sends the contract back to the CRM with a validation certificate. The CRM processes it from there, storing all the documents and linking them to the deal record from which it was initially sent. With our custom solutions regarding Zoho help, the clients can enjoy —
- An efficient way to store all the relevant information of the client
- Creating the contract with the new or existing contract template
Passing all the collected information into the newly created contract documents for the sign off
- Tool to take over the contract for sign off and send over the signed documents into the system that does the recordkeeping
Bringing all your personalised business and administrative processes under one central hub through which they can be accessed and operated
At the same time, our expert suggestions and implementations can help you enjoy the following benefits—
- Sales reps can be relieved from manually entering the data for a large volume of contracts with the increasing clients
No more manual entry means little or no human error, leading to a positive impression of the company
The time saved through this automation and integration spared the clients from micromanaging and let them focus on more critical aspects of your business
Retrenched the cost by preventing more people being hired to do the administrative tasks
If you are in a similar problem, looking to integrate your Zoho to Zoho apps or any third-party apps, our top-notch Zoho consultants of OscilloSoft are more than happy to configure and customise your API. This seamless cooperation between the apps helps you achieve an all-in-one singular Zoho ecosystem to make the best use of your property management company’s time and resources. And it’s already established in the above Zoho CRM use case that with strategic implementation of appropriate Zoho integrations, you can prepare such a successful Zoho case study for every industry.
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