Approvals in a contract serve as essential guardrails and checkpoints that ensure both the contracting process and its outcome are compliant. At SpotDraft, our approval system has been instrumental in making sure real-world scenarios are easily replicated and that contracts are routed to the correct stakeholders for the necessary checks before they move forward.

Effortless Setup and Powerful Features for Everyday Contracting

After processing over 100,000 approvals and gathering extensive user feedback, we reimagined approvals on SpotDraft. This new release introduces features to make approvals set up a lot easier and we are bringing in features to address dynamic scenarios commonly seen across Workspaces.

Better control on triggering Approvals at the right time

Approval when your contract template undergoes redlining

Pre-approved templates in CLMs allow for faster and more accurate contracting, as they’ve already undergone legal scrutiny. However, during negotiations, contracts could go through redlining, which generally leads to deviations which might require internal scrutiny. That’s where Redlining Approvals come in. 

Whenever a template-generated contract is edited or redlined, the system automatically triggers a new round of approvals to review those changes. This ensures that no unapproved modifications slip through.

Advanced Ways to Setup Approvals based on Contract Conditions 

SpotDraft is introducing a powerful feature for configuring complex conditional approvals. Previously, users could only create basic conditions which limited the ability to set up intricate approval that are required.

Moving forward, users can create highly specific approval conditions by combining a range of functions and contract variables with multiple operators (such as AND and OR) to build custom approval flows—much like crafting formulas in Excel or Google Sheets. Autocomplete suggestions assist users in crafting these conditions quickly and accurately.

To know more in depth about the different Supported functions check out this doc.

Example:

Suppose you want to take approval from the finance head for any department expense exceeding its specified budget. Each department has an assigned budget:

• Marketing: $20,000
• Legal: $10,000
• HR: $10,000
• BizOps: $30,000

Using SpotDraft’s advanced conditional builder, you can set up a single approval condition with nested logic to capture these complex requirements. For instance:

for ex. - 

IF (Department = "Marketing" AND Expense Amount > $20,000) 

OR ((Department = "Legal" OR Department = "HR") AND Expense Amount > $10,000) 

OR (Department = "BizOps" AND Expense Amount > $30,000)

Writing conditions in this format would not be possible with a basic condition builder. However, SpotDraft’s advanced condition builder allows you to create this custom logic with ease.

Automatic Recollection of Approvals

Contracts often evolve through multiple rounds of changes. When the conditions of a previously approved contract are modified—such as a new version being uploaded or important details updated—it’s crucial that the necessary approvals are reset to ensure the changes are properly reviewed.

With Automatic Recollection of Approvals, the system automatically resets necessary approvals. This ensures that every update passes through the right set of eyes without requiring any manual intervention.

Ad-Hoc Approvals at Any Stage

Contracting is rarely a linear process and some changes may also require additional approvals mid-way through. With the new Ad-Hoc Approvals feature, you can add approvals at any point in the negotiation process.

Whether it’s last-minute input from a senior stakeholder or addressing a new risk that came up during negotiation, ad-hoc approvals ensure that these changes are properly considered, keeping the process agile and responsive.

Pausing Approvals

Sometimes, getting to the next step in the contracting process depends on actions that need to happen externally, like waiting for feedback/input from a counterparty or collecting all the necessary information internally. With the Pausing Approvals feature, you can ensure that internal approvals don’t progress until all necessary steps are completed, providing better control over the contracting flow.

User and Team-Based Control for Contract Approvals and Actions

With our enhanced user and team-based controls, you can now define if any users can skip the approval process, control downloads during approvals, or prevent contracts from being sent to counterparties until fully approved.

This is particularly useful in maintaining a strict review process, ensuring that only certain individuals with designated permissions can bypass approvals.

How Do These Changes Impact You?

These new features are designed to simplify the approval process, making it easier to set them up and also adapt to the unique challenges your team faces in contracting. With greater flexibility and control, your team can work smarter ensuring more efficient workflows.