Overview
Finalize has a pre-defined workflow for agreements managed within the system. Finalize breaks up the end-to-end process of managing an agreement into separate phases, which are then broken up into statuses within each phase. Having status and phases within your Agreement workflow will give you the power to always know where your agreement is in the process at a high level.
Agreement Phases
Agreement statuses are grouped across the five phases of the contracting process:
Request Phase
- An agreement has been requested from legal but has not yet been created.
- Request forms start the process here.
- This phase measures how long it takes a legal team to generate the first draft of a requested contract.
Review Phase
- An agreement has been drafted and is being reviewed and revised by all parties.
- Draft templates (Our Paper), Intake workflows (3rd Party Paper), and agreements created from Request forms start the process here.
- The goal of the Review phase is to get to an agreed-upon version.
- This phase measures how long it takes a legal team to negotiate and finalize the final draft of a contract.
Signature Phase
- An agreement is either ready for signature or in the process of being signed by all parties.
- Signature-only templates start the process here.
- This phase measures how long it takes a legal team to execute a finalized contract.
Complete Phase
- An agreement is fully signed and executed, and ready to move on to analysis and management.
- This phase measures how long a fully signed contract has existed.
- At this phase, agreements can be automatically ingested into LinkSquares Analyze based on your Finalize Administrator team's settings. To learn more about managing these settings, reference our article on Analyze and Finalize Integration.
Paused Phase
- An agreement is put on hold temporarily.
For example, as timelines and budgets shift, agreements might be put on hold and revisited in a future quarter.
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Agreement Statuses
Agreement statuses provide visibility into where the agreement lies in the pre-signature workflow.
Request Pending
An agreement request starts in this status if the Request form has been filled out, but an initial draft of the agreement has not been submitted.
Internal Review
An agreement is being reviewed internally or needs to be reviewed internally before being sent to the counterparty.
Counterparty Review
An agreement has been sent to the counterparty for review and approval or needs to be sent to the counterparty.
Ready for Signature
An agreement automatically moves into this status once all parties approve an agreement and no other external approvals or tasks are required.
Agreements will stay in this status until it has been sent out for signature.
Out for Signature
An agreement has been sent for signature to all of the counterparties.
Partially Signed
An agreement has been signed by some of the required parties, but not all.
Fully Signed
An agreement has been signed by all parties. Agreements will automatically advance to this status when all signatures have been completed.
At this stage, agreements can be sent over to Analyze automatically for ingestion, management, and analysis depending on your Finalize Administrator team's settings.
To learn more about managing these settings, reference our article on Analyze and Finalize Integration.
Done
If no signatures are required for an agreement, agreements will advance to this status once completed.
The Done status is intended to provide an alternative option to Fully Signed, for documents that are completed and no longer need to be worked on, but have not had a legally binding signature(s) applied to them.
This status is not an indication that end users are complete with their associated work and should not be used to kick off the next steps in your internal processes unless the agreement has been completed.
Even if an agreement has open tasks, moving the agreement to the Done status will override the need for these tasks to be completed. Agreements will not flow through the intended workflows for signature. If configured in your Finalize settings, they will be mapped straight to Analyze without your signature.
Depending on your use case, this status may also include agreements that have been abandoned and are not moving forward.
At this stage, agreements can be sent over to Analyze automatically for ingestion, management, and analysis depending on your Finalize Administrator team's settings.
To learn more about managing these settings, reference our article on Analyze and Finalize Integration.
Reverting Done Agreements
Administrators can revert agreements in the Done and Fully Signed status back to any of the following statuses:
- Internal Review
- Counterparty Review
- Ready for Signature
- Partially Signed
- Out for Signature
- Fully Signed
Agreements cannot be reverted to the Request Pending and Paused statuses.
To revert agreements within the Done and Fully Signed status, Administrators can select a new status from the drop-down within the individual agreement view.
Note: Tasks will not reopen when the status is reverted.
If agreements within the Done or Fully Signed status are configured by your Finalize Administrator team to ingest into Analyze, the agreement will be ingested as usual.
If the status is reverted from Done, Fully Signed to a previous status, the agreement will remain in Analyze. If the status is once again moved to Done or Fully Signed (in which case the latter must be configured to ingest into Analyze), the new version file will override the old version. The information from the first version is maintained (e.g., agreement ID) and only the file itself is replaced. LinkSquares AI will be rerun within the new version.
Access to move agreements to the Done status can be controlled on a per-role basis by Finalize administrators. Administrators can uncheck which roles have the ability to move agreements to Done via the settings panel. These settings will apply to ALL users in your account who are assigned that Finalize role.
Paused
An agreement has been paused or abandoned until further notice.
This is where an agreement moves when no additional work is foreseen (e.g., the agreement has been abandoned for the time being, but future work will resume at some point). Outstanding tasks become inactive, but not deleted. If an agreement is unpaused, those tasks are reactivated.
Agreement owners and Administrators can move agreements into this status. The agreement can be unpaused at a later date.