Manage Public Sector Contracts in One Place

Many agency stakeholders are involved in the public sector contract life cycle, including administrative, finance, and technology staff as well as vendors. With so many internal and external stakeholders touching contracts, the potential for errors increases.

In addition to the many hands involved, various departments might handle contracts differently. What's more, two different contracts could have two different processes within the same department. One staff member might process contracts a certain way, and another staff member might approach the same task differently. This lack of consistency and process can leave an organization vulnerable to elevated risk.

Vendor involvement adds another layer of complexity to public sector contract management. These external stakeholders each have their own way of managing projects, contracts, and invoices. They also might be constituents who need to determine whether the organization they are contracting with is a good steward of the public’s resources.

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Crowe Contract Manager for public sector is a tool for contract stakeholders

It’s tough to track the entire contract life cycle across disparate systems and with different processes. To break down silos and streamline public sector contract management, it’s necessary to think about the process in a new way.

Determining what’s best for everyone involved in the contract management process is critical. Organizations can shift their way of thinking by considering what’s best for a specific department and identifying what doesn’t scale.

We built Crowe Contract Manager for public sector to create a more holistic process for the public sector contract management life cycle. This tool brings clarity to the contracting process, helps save time, provides transparency between organizations and vendors, and offers insight into how taxpayer dollars are spent.

How different roles can benefit from Crowe Contract Manager for public sector

The departments, roles, and responsibilities of those who manage contracts differ from organization to organization. Size, resources, and leadership all shape how an organization is structured. Following are several examples of different roles that can benefit from having a unified public sector contract management platform.

Administrative staff

Crowe Contract Manager for public sector offers functions for improving each stage in the life cycle of a contract.

Positions such as deputy administrator or director of administration often are responsible for purchasing project management systems for their teams. As buyers, they can appreciate having one public sector contract management solution for the many different people they lead, as it provides a single source of truth for all staff. Managing contracts in one place eliminates confusion about what version is most recent or what spreadsheet is accurate.

The handoff process is one area where contract and project managers can particularly benefit from having one tool for tracking a contract. In some operating environments, handoffs could rely on email or paper files being dropped off on a desk. But with Crowe Contract Manager for public sector, when teams hand off to one another, they simply need to know the record ID to access the information.

A streamlined platform also helps teams avoid duplicative efforts when entering information by eliminating dated spreadsheets and a reliance on numerous email chains. Contract analysts might especially benefit from this feature as they perform day-to-day tracking.

In terms of training new employees, relying on one central tool can benefit everyone involved. Current employees don’t have to keep up with manual, time-consuming tasks, which means they have more time to onboard new personnel, and a consolidated tool is easier to learn than disparate, disorganized systems.

Finance staff

Budget managers and officers handle funding and financial details during contract initiation and setup. They also need to sort through any financial estimates or encumbrances that need attention during the contract life cycle. Crowe Contract Manager for public sector gives them the ability to identify funding source and amounts in the same location they can find other contract information, thus eliminating the need to check an enterprise resource planning tool every time or to keep a secondary spreadsheet for tracking.

Logging this information in the same system everyone uses also reduces the number of questions budget professionals must field from other staff about sources of funds, the amount used, and the amount remaining. Since the whole team has visibility to the information, people can access information quickly and on their own.

Invoice management specialists can benefit from how Crowe Contract Manager for public sector streamlines tasks, including integrated invoice approval. In one place, they can manage the invoice approval step, tie invoices back to work products or orders, and store and reference invoice documents.

Additionally, financial and portfolio management teams can more quickly respond to on-demand reporting requests. For example, if leadership immediately needs a report, having one tool to generate the report is more efficient than tracking down different people and spreadsheets to gather the correct information.

Information technology staff

When determining what technology to procure, administrators might look to chief information officers and other IT specialists for opinions on whether the technology makes sense for their agency.

IT specialists can benefit from having just one contract management solution to learn and support. Because Crowe Contract Manager for public sector is built on the Microsoft Dynamics 365™ platform, they won’t have to maintain server hardware.

Our public sector consultants can support IT teams in a variety of ways. From the initial implementation of this cloud-based technology to ongoing modifications, Crowe consultants can help solve problems that might surface.

Vendors

Keeping track of vendor time sheets and invoices more efficiently is possible. Crowe Contract Manager for public sector includes a contract portal that grants vendors access to electronic time sheets, and it automates internal routing of vendor invoices.

When vendors can submit to a portal rather than to email addresses, the chance of vendor details getting lost in email inboxes due to vacations, staff turnover, or spam filters decreases.

The contract portal streamlines work with vendors and improves vendor-related internal staff workflow. Functionality that improves the contract experience for the internal team and for external vendors is a big win.

Manage public sector contracts in one place

Managing contracts in one place – rather than across disparate systems – can help public sector contract management teams save time, reduce errors, and increase proactive management capacity.

Crowe Contract Manager for public sector is a module within the Crowe Government Hub, a suite of solutions on one platform to help simplify all your operations.

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Let us help you say goodbye to silos and hello to centralized public sector contract management.