This article will walk you through what enhanced contract reminders are and how to use them.
Contract reminders help you and your team stay on top of your contractual obligations by allowing you to create flexible email reminders for all of the contracts you want to keep track of in the Dashboard.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCE
If you want to learn more about enhanced contract reminders in video format, refer to our Academy course: Getting Started with Enhanced Reminders.
You can set up reminders for any set of contracts that you can search for in your Dashboard and send them to any of your Ironclad users. Here are a few examples of useful reminders:
- Send a weekly reminder to contract owners with all of their contracts that are expiring or renewing within the next 90 days
- Send a quarterly reminder to the finance team of all vendor contracts over $100,000, executed in the last quarter
- Send a quarterly reminder to the legal team of all contracts that contain a risky obligation, such as an uncapped Limitation of Liability
- Send a prompt reminder exactly 7 days before each MSA is set to expire
Create a Complex Contract Reminder
The following steps show how to create a contract reminder to remind all contract owners of their contracts that are expiring within the next 90 days:
- In the Dashboard, filter or search for the contracts you want to receive reminders for:
- If you want to send reminders for expiring contracts of all types in the Repository view on the Dashboard, skip this step.
- Otherwise, filter or search for your contracts or select a saved view. In this example, create a reminder for all expiring contracts that belong to your Marketing organization by adding the Business Unit filter and filter for contracts where the Business Unit is “Marketing”.
- After you filter the Dashboard for your desired subset of contracts, click Email reminder. Email reminders are associated with saved views. A new view is automatically created.
- If you are not an administrator, skip this step. You can only send reminders to yourself. In the To field, select the users you want to send the reminder to. Reminders can be sent to:
- Individual users in your company.
- Groups in your company.
- A specific role within your company. Reminders sent to these users only contain the contracts where the user assumed the selected role. For example, if the Workflow Owner property is added as a recipient, a user will receive an email reminder with only the contracts in the reminder where they are listed as the Workflow Owner. If a user is not a Workflow Owner for any of the contracts, then they will not receive an email reminder.
- User properties in each contract (such as Counterparty Signer Email). Reminders sent to these emails only contain the contracts with which the email properties are associated. Emails that are not associated with an Ironclad user will not receive a reminder.
Search for the corresponding individual, group, or role and select them from the dropdown. Users included as recipients to an email reminder will only receive contract records that they have permission to view in the Repository. In this example, remind all of the owners of expiring marketing contracts that they have an upcoming expiration to review. Select Workflow Owner in the “To” field.
- Customize the body of the email reminder to explain to the recipients what the reminder is for and why they are receiving it. A maximum of 15 contract records will appear in a single email body, though the email will include a link to view all of the contracts in Ironclad.
Image of Default Email Message
Image of Customized Email Message
- Click the Reminder Alert dropdown and determine how often the reminder will be sent. You can set the reminder cadence to send Promptly (One time or One email) or Periodically (Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, or Annually). In this example, configure the alert so that contract owners receive a weekly reminder of all of the Marketing contracts they own that are expiring within the next 90 days.
- In the Properties Added dropdown, choose which contract data to include in the email reminder. Select up to five properties to display in the email. In this example, include Expiration Date, Counterparty Name, and Contract Value as the data to show with each contract. Sort the contracts in the email by Expiration Date.
Image of Properties Added Settings
Image of Customized Email
- To review your reminder, click Send me a test email. A test email is sent to your email address for review. When you are happy with the reminder, click Create. In this example, owners of expiring Marketing contracts will now receive a weekly email reminder. This will also create a new Saved View that is specifically associated with the reminder.
NOTE
For testing purposes, the Preview button in Ironclad does not consider the reminder schedule you configured, but instead sends an email with all records in the saved view.
Edit Reminders
You can edit any contract reminders you own and view any where you are listed as a recipient in Company Settings > Notifications > Contract Reminders. Company Administrators can view/edit all existing contract reminders here.
- In the top right corner, click on your profile icon > Company Settings > Notifications.
- Click the Contract Reminders tab.
- Update or delete the reminder. If you delete the associated saved view, the reminder will also be deleted.
Frequency Schedule
Prompt
Prompt reminders notify users about their contract obligations on a specified date (One time) or immediately once a date property rule is triggered (One email).
Date property rules are used to send the prompt reminder on a dynamic date; that is, x number of days before/after a date property associated with each contract in the saved view.
For example, if the reminder is set for “one email 90 days before expiration date”, then user recipients will receive an email on a given day if they have one or more contracts in the view expiring exactly 90 days from that day. The email reminder will include only those contracts meeting the expiration criteria.
NOTE
If there are no contracts satisfying the criteria on a certain day, then no email is sent at all.
This type of reminder will always provide the same amount of days’ notice for your contract obligations so you know exactly how much time you have to act.
A prompt email reminder does not continue to remind you for the same contract if you do not take swift action for the upcoming contract obligation. In the example above, one email is sent exactly 90 days before expiration date for each contract, and no additional reminder alerts will be sent thereafter. For this reason, consider configuring multiple prompt email reminders from the same saved view in tandem, in order to provide successively more urgent alerts (e.g., 90-30-10 reminders). Alternatively, the periodic frequencies (discussed below) will send recurring emails of your upcoming contract obligations at a regular cadence.
Periodic
Periodic email reminders notify users about their contract obligations with an email digest sent at a regular cadence. The frequency options for periodic email reminders are weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly. For each frequency option is the ability to select when within each interval to receive the reminder (e.g., weekly on Tuesdays) or add a date property filter to only include contracts that are within x number of days before/after a particular date property.
Periodic reminders based on a date property will be sent on the first Monday of every period (e.g., 1st Monday of every month for Monthly).
For example, if the reminder is set for “weekly 90 days before expiration date”, then user recipients will receive an email on the first of every week (Mondays) containing all contracts in the view that are set to expire within the next 90 days.
NOTE
When using periodic frequency emails if there are no contracts meeting the specified date filter, then users will receive an empty email reminder with message "Nothing to review today!". This way they won't be left wondering whether this quarter's up-to-date digest has been sent yet or if there was just no action to take.
Periodic reminder frequencies are tailored to users who have a large number of contracts they'd like to be reminded about and want to combine notifications throughout the week into a single email that they receive at a regularly scheduled time. This is in contrast to prompt reminders which have the potential to be sent on different/multiple days each week depending on which days exactly satisfy the reminder criteria.
Periodic frequencies are best paired with reminders whose date filter provides sufficient advance notice if action is required. Indeed, a weekly reminder one day before expiration date is not recommended because contracts that expire during the week will not be included in the Monday email if they expire on any day other than Monday/Tuesday.