11th Day of Automation: Send Contracts Automatically

It’s the 11th Day of Automation! See Day 9 and Day 10.

A contract makes your brand new job official, grants you shares in a start-up, forges a partnership between two organizations, or means that your agency landed a client. Just a mere decade ago a contract always meant a paper agreement. Today, however, with the frequency and distance they need to be sent in a global economy and the security needed to keep official documents safe, e-contracts from trusted cloud apps such as DocuSign are becoming commonplace. These e-contracts still do all the things listed above, they just come with the added bonus of being digital – and that means you can automate them.

Automating the sending, collection, and storage of these documents comes with the standard benefits of any workflow automation – saving time, reduces errors, eliminating manual data entry etc. – but the extra conveniences really add up towards making your business more efficient and therefore more profitable.

The easiest way to approach automating your contract process is to think about your workflow in two parts: 1. Sending the Contract (before the signer signs the contract) and 2. Storing the Contract (after the signer signs). This allows for the time between the sending of the contract and when the signer sends the signed contract back to you.

You can easily automate your partner program, NDA’s or really any contracts that need to be sent out using Workato to integrate, DocuSign for e-contracts, and Box for storage. Let’s dive deeper into a contract automation workflow inspired by both Workato’s own Partner Program Automation and the Platform Partner Program Automation Box uses internally.

I. Automatically Sending Out A Contract

If you are running a partner program you most likely have a web form on your website where people can sign up or someway to transfer leads into your Customer Relationship Management Tool (CRM) – if you don’t have a way to automatically send sign ups to your CRM, you can do that with Workato too. In this scenario, Salesforce collects the leads from our sign up form and we’ve built in a human workflow to make sure only qualified applicants are accepted.

When someone signs up and a new contact is created in Salesforce with the status “Undecided,” Workato will send a People Task notification via email to the program manager. The program manager can click into People Task, view the application information and click “Approve” or “Reject.” If the applicant is not approved, Workato will send an email asking for more information and update the Salesforce contact as rejected. If the applicant is approved, Workato will pre-populate the fields such as name and address in the DocuSign contract, send it to the applicant, and update the Salesforce contact as accepted.

All of this is done automatically and requires zero intervention from the program manager outside of clicking “Approve” or “Reject” during the human workflow thanks to the Workato recipe below.

For Part II, Storing the Contract and Partner Collaboration Read the Original Post >

About the author
Kristine Colosimo
Kristine oversees Workato's content and works with awesome apps like DocuSign, Zendesk, SurveyMonkey etc. on great automation content.