Governing Summary: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
- What are Governing Summaries?
- How do I enable Governing Summaries in my account?
- How can I customize my Governing Summaries?
- Is there a limit to the number of agreements allowed in a Governing Summary?
- What Global Settings are available for Governing Summaries?
- What are the permission settings I can use for a Governing Summary?
- Do agreements have to be in a parent-child hierarchy to link them together into a Governing Summary?
- How does the Governing Summary reporting functionality work?
- What are the best practices in initially setting up Governing Summaries?
- What are the best practices for the ongoing maintenance of Governing Summaries?
- Which agreements do I include in a Governing Summary?
- How do I name my Governing Summary?
- What should I know about tuning my Governing Summary settings?
What are Governing Summaries?
A Governing Summary is a rollup of the active language across a group of agreements. Governing Summaries help keep track of amended language, so LinkSquares Analyze users do not need to manually search through their repository for the active language of their agreements. Governing Summaries save you time and resources.
How do I enable Governing Summaries in my account?
Enable Governing Summaries in your Analyze account by reaching out to your Customer Success Manager. After the feature has been enabled, LinkSquares will provide initial suggestions for summaries, and you can begin to create your own.
Is there a limit to the number of agreements allowed in a Governing Summary?
No.
How can I customize my Governing Summaries?
Governing Summaries are customizable by adding or removing agreements of a given summary at any time, and enabling or disabling the Governing Terms across individual summaries.
What Global Settings are available for Governing Summaries?
1. Set Default Source of the Governing Terms
Select this option if you want your Governing Terms to initially populate based on:
- Most recent Effective Date
- Most recent updated date
- Most recent uploaded date
2. Set Default Behavior for Linked Agreements
Select this option if you want to include linked agreements by default.
3. Set Default Terms Across New Governing Summaries
Select this option to standardize the terms you would like to be enabled across all new Governing Summaries.
What are the permission settings I can use for a Governing Summary?
There are two levels of permissions for Governing Summaries:
1. On any role except Standard, you can select whether the role can edit and publish Governing Summaries or whether they can simply view published summaries.
2. Standard roles can only view published Governing Summaries.
Do agreements have to be in a parent-child hierarchy to link them together into a Governing Summary?
No. Any agreements can be linked together in a Governing Summary.
Do I have to manually choose all the Governing Terms for my Governing Summary?
LinkSquares makes an initial suggestion of the appropriate Governing Terms based on the most recently uploaded agreement. This initial suggestion can be manually changed at any time by a user with edit access. The default source setting can be added in the Analyze Global Settings at any time.
How does the Governing Summary reporting functionality work?
You will be able to report on any Governing Terms across your Governing Summaries. For example, a Governing Summary will have one single Warranty Clause instead of many single agreements having Warranty Clauses you would need to consider with their amendments.
Reporting for Governing Summaries will allow you to filter by Tags, Global Terms, and Governing Summary names.
What are the best practices in initially setting up Governing Summaries?
Establishing Parent-Child Hierarchies
Governing Summary is created for each parent-child hierarchy when you first enable the feature. Having parent-child hierarchies set up will not only help you logically link agreements, but it will also help you to ease the initial lift of getting Governing Summaries off the ground.
To learn more about best practices on parent-child hierarchies, reference our article on Parent-Child Hierarchy Best Practices.
Tagging
It is best practice to add tags to your Governing Summaries.
Visibility
Publish or unpublish your Governing Summaries appropriately.
You can save unpublished versions of Governing Summaries to return to at a later time. This can be accessed by going to the Governing Summaries section of the main Agreements page.
Unpublished Governing Summaries will not be visible to Standard users. More granular permission levels (who can see published or unpublished versions) for Governing Summaries can be set by Administrators via custom roles (Settings > Analyze App > Roles tab). Administrators and Managers can create and edit existing Governing Summaries.
What are the best practices for the ongoing maintenance of Governing Summaries?
LinkSquares recommends adding each agreement to a Governing Summary as soon as it gets ingested into Analyze.
Analyze Administrators and Managers should monitor the Pending tab from the main Agreements page to ensure any necessary agreements are absorbed into the appropriate parent-child hierarchy or Governing Summary.
Which agreements do I include in a Governing Summary?
- Include all agreements involved in a business relationship.
- Include standard terms and amendments that apply to this relationship and others.
- Do not include agreements from a separate business relationship.
- It is up to your organization whether to classify a business relationship by your entire business (e.g., LinkSquares and Dell, encompassing several business units) or by one of your business units (e.g., LinkSquares USA and Dell). If you have a folder structure in another system, it may be worthwhile to mimic that structure for your Governing Summaries.
- It is up to your organization whether to include expired agreements for reference or to exclude them. Agreements can live within a Governing Summary even if they do not contribute any Governing Terms.
How do I name my Governing Summary?
There is not an automatic naming convention for Governing Summaries like Smart Renaming for agreements today.
LinkSquares recommends naming your Governing Summary after the counterparty plus any other important details about the business relationship (e.g., “Dell Summary - EMEA”).
Governing Summaries with the same name are not allowed.
What should I know about tuning my Governing Summary settings?
- Settings are forward-acting, not retroactive. Any changes made will not affect existing Governing Summaries.
- The Governing Terms source logic reruns when a Governing Summary is run, or when an agreement is added or removed from a Governing Summary. (Note: More frequent and easy refreshing of terms is an enhancement on the roadmap.) If even one item within an agreement has changed (e.g., term, name, and tag), this entire agreement will take precedence in the Governing Terms extraction logic.
- Hiding Governing Terms is recommended when a term does not make sense to summarize. For example, the Invoice Number term would make sense only for an individual invoice, not for an overall business relationship.
- When in doubt, hide a term from a Governing Summary to reduce possible misleading terms in your Governing Summaries. You can show terms at any point later.
- To hide Governing Terms within an individual summary, click EDIT GOVERNING TERMS, then disable the SHOW TERM toggle.
- To hide a Governing Term on ALL Governing Summaries, go to Settings > Analyze App > Governing Summary tab and disable the appropriate term toggle. Click APPLY once complete.
- Some organizations prefer this setting for the Document Title term and specific payment terms, for example.