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Overview
Reminder emails let you automate one-time or recurring emails based on contract metadata. This recipe is especially useful if your renewal process starts a set number of days before a contract expires or renews, or if contract owners are currently tracking expiration and renewal dates manually.
The goals of this recipe are:
- Reduce manual effort for tracking expiration dates
- Eliminate missed renewals due to human error
- Increase process adherence
- Reduce time spent reviewing individual accounts pre-renewal
Use Case
Gettie’s Goats has a process for renewing contracts that starts 90 days before the expiration/renewal date. The first step is initiated by the Account Executive who owns the customer account. In order to provide a cushion, they set up an automated contract reminder email for each contract that gets sent to the account owner 95 days before expiration. In addition to the sheer reminder of an upcoming expiration, they took a couple of extra steps to increase the efficiency of the process:
- The reminder email includes all steps of the renewal process in the body of the email.
- They added extra columns to the included Dashboard View that help with initial account review.
What You'll Need
This recipe should only be used if you are confident that your basic contract metadata is complete and accurate. If you are unsure about this, see the article Clean Up Data with Data Manager in the Resources section below.
| Features | Dashboard Views, Email Reminders |
| Permissions | User & Group Administration*, Repository Access |
*If a user has User & Group Administration permission, they can create email reminders for anyone. If a user does not have the requisite admin permissions, they can only create contract reminder emails for themselves.
Supporting Resources
Instructions
To build automated emails that streamline your renewals, follow the steps below in order:
Create a Dashboard View
First, you must create a new dashboard view with the following columns and filters.
- Click Add View indicated by a plus sign in the top left corner.
- Enter a name for your view. Your new, blank view is located under the My Views section of the Views sidebar.
- Add columns to your view. Click Add column indicated by a plus sign. A dropdown list of all of your record properties from your completed workflows display. Locate the record property you want to make a column by scrolling or searching for it. Add the following columns:
- Counterparty Name
- Status
- Expiration Date
- Renewal Type
- Record Type
- Contract Value
- Agreement Date
- Contract Owner
- Entity
- Add filters to your view. Click All to display the filtering dropdown. Select a filter from the dropdown. You can filter by contract workflows, users, fields, clauses, and properties. Add the following filters:
- [Stage] is [Imported] or [Completed]
- Click Save and update view. Your custom view is updated.
Check Your Data
Before creating a reminder email, it is important to be sure that your contract metadata is complete and accurate. This is most important with the property that you select as the trigger for sending the reminder email itself. In this case, that’s Expiration Date. (If a record doesn’t have data for this property, it will never be sent out in a reminder email.)
The best way to check if all relevant records have an Expiration Date is to do the following:
- Click the view that you just created.
- Sort your records by the Expiration Date column (either ascending or descending).
- Navigate to the last page of the view.
- All records without any data in the filtered property are sorted to the bottom of the list, so if you don’t see any records without an Expiration Date on the final page, then you know that everything at least has data in that property.
If you find that your data is incomplete or inaccurate, refer to Clean Up Data Schema Models in Ironclad.
Build the Email Reminder
- Click on the view you just created.
- Click the three stacked dots located in the top right, and then click Email Reminder. The email reminder modal displays.
-
Enter the following details in the email reminder modal:
- To: Leave this set as Workflow Owner.
- Subject: Choose a subject for the emails you send.
- Email Body: This will be the email body for all reminder emails. If there is a process connected to the upcoming renewals, you can include the process here.
-
Reminder Schedule: One email | 95 Days | Before | Expiration Date
-
Properties Added: Counterparty Name; Agreement Date; Expiration Date; Renewal Type; Contract Value.
These 5 properties will appear in the email itself. The email will also include a link directly to Ironclad, which will open with the View associated with this email already applied, thereby providing the recipient with a quick data snapshot for these records.
- We suggest using the Send Me a Test Email option before clicking Create.s
NOTE
The body of Reminder Emails will display up to 15 listed contracts and your five selected metadata properties. To see more than 15 contracts, or more than the five listed properties, recipients can click a link in the email to be taken directly into the Ironclad Dashboard, with the custom view associated with the email already applied.
View and Edit Email Reminders
You can view and edit your email reminders by going to the Notifications section in Company Settings. Click on your profile icon located in the top right corner of Ironclad. Navigate to Company Settings > Notifications > Contract Reminders. You can view all of the contract reminders that you have created, and modify or delete each one.
If you are an admin user, this page will show you all reminder emails created by any admin user. If you are not an admin user, you will see only contract reminders that you have created for yourself.
Result
Each upcoming Expiration Date will generate an automated email sent to its listed Workflow Owner exactly 95 days before a contract’s Expiration Date.
The email itself will contain a list of records and their upcoming Expiration Dates (up to 15 listed) and some basic data about the agreements.
By following an included link into Ironclad, the Workflow Owner can view additional metadata and have easy access to the agreement itself, plus its workflow data if it was created via a workflow.