Live Contracts come to Accordium!
A sleek new interface called Ultra is the most striking change, but it’s not just a pretty face – we rewrote the application core from scratch to support our ambitions for the future. Powered by a brand new integration-ready API, Ultra brings with it a wealth of new features and possibilities.
Today I’ll show you how our biggest improvement, The Editor, standardizes your documents and gets contracts signed faster than ever before.
Although it sounds like some kind of all-powerful cosmic censor, The Editor is a highly capable text processor just like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. In fact, you can happily copy and paste directly from those programs and in most cases we’ll preserve your formatting one-to-one.
All the layout tools you’d expect from a serious editor, like fonts and headings, tables, images, numbering and bullets are all present – just paste from your existing documents, or create new ones from scratch in Accordium.
Templates: Do less work, save more time, earn more money.
Editing documents directly inside Accordium is a fine addition, but the material benefits run deeper than that. At first glance it might seem like a superficial improvement – after all, you already have text editors at your disposal – but The Editor was created with two goals in mind.
Templates & Live Contracts
The real reason the Editor exists is to enable the creation of templates that can be created once and reused many times, while also retaining their editability. This returns time to you previously lost on repetitive tasks.
In old Accordium you had to upload a new PDF every time a contract was sent, no matter how minor the changes. This was a significant waste of time. Now you can write standard text into a template – then just clone it and make some adjustments like name and date, before sending it out. Whenever you send a contract now, most of the hard work has already been done.
Best of all; if you’ve already sent a contract then realize you want to edit something, you can simply change the original and everyone will get the latest version automatically! We call this feature Live Contracts, since all parties always have the latest version – live.
Never again will you have to clumsily withdraw the contract, make a new one in an external editor, then re-upload the PDF before sending the whole thing all over again. This is a great time-saver and efficiency gain for anyone sending contracts regularly. It also means that your recipients won’t have to wait for fresh invitation mails with every new version, or see you withdrawing contracts that are no longer valid.
Not only do templates allow for rapid re-use and live editing, but they naturally provide a degree of standardization to your workflow. Many of our customers use standard terms in every offer, and now we can provide that function directly inside Accordium – ensuring that every time you send a contract it’s derived from the same master, over and over again, and free from error.
Summary
I’ve described the essential features of our Editor release, and how they can boost your efficiency and accuracy at work. It’s our hope that the first version of this major release already saves you a lot of effort and repetition for the most boring, redundant and error-prone parts of your job.
In the next quarter we’ll be adding the ability to make and clone templated Flows too, so that the entire contract lifecycle can be modeled in a snapshot for full automation – letting you concentrate on getting things signed, instead of configuring software.
We’re really excited to continue building our promise of an integrated and beautiful machine that can accelerate both your work and your revenue.
As always, I’m real human and your feedback is critical to my company and I. So please write to me on product@accordium.com – let me know what’s great and what sucks, and I’ll reply – for reals 🙂
