Bringing Intelligence to Obligation Management in Docusign IAM

Agreements define the commitments that keep businesses running—renewal deadlines, payment schedules, service obligations, and compliance requirements. Yet, despite their importance, obligation management is often handled through disconnected, manual processes like spreadsheets, email reminders, and ad hoc tracking.

This reactive approach is time-consuming and leaves room for costly errors. Missed renewal windows lead to unwanted auto-renewals or lost revenue. Overlooked payment terms result in penalties. A forgotten termination deadline locks a company into an unneeded service for another costly term. 

The stakes are high. That’s why we’re redefining post-signature agreement management through Obligation Management in Docusign IAM. This set of capabilities, built into Docusign Navigator, equips organizations with an intelligent way to surface, track, and manage contractual obligations—all within a centralized contract repository.

Bringing intelligence to Obligation Management

For too long, businesses have focused on contract negotiation and execution while neglecting post-signature management. However, a contract's actual value comes from fulfilling its commitments. That requires a structured, proactive approach to obligation tracking.

With Obligation Management, organizations can:

• Review and track key obligations

• Receive proactive alerts and generate reports on scheduled commitments

• Easily capture, assign, and monitor custom tasks

• Leverage a unified repository for complete post-signature visibility

Obligation tracking is powered by Docusign Iris, a new AI engine behind every AI capability built on the Docusign IAM platform. Organizations can move beyond spreadsheets and manual reminders to a structured, proactive system that helps ensure obligations are met without the need for constant oversight.

Instead of searching through contracts for key terms, Docusign Iris automatically surfaces renewal, payment, and termination obligations, ensuring nothing slips through the cracks. Rules-based notifications and reporting make it easy to stay ahead of key milestones, while the ability to track unique obligations and assign fulfillment tasks promotes accountability.

With a unified agreement repository called Docusign Navigator, teams can finally manage contracts post-signature in a single system of record—reducing risk, improving efficiency, and ensuring commitments are met consistently across the organization.

The business impact of Obligation Management

Obligation Management within Navigator leads to tangible business outcomes that make implementation more than worth it. Here are a few: 

• Visibility and control: Visibility suffers when contract obligations are scattered across email chains and spreadsheets and can create hours of tedious work. In fact, we surveyed over 1,300 contracting professionals who reported an average of two hours spent searching for specific language within a contract. Docusign Obligation Management brings all contractual commitments into one place, allowing teams to manage upcoming deadlines and deliverables proactively and easily search for key language.

• Operational efficiency: Manually tracking obligations is time-consuming and error-prone. Automatically surfacing and managing obligations reduces administrative burden while ensuring nothing is overlooked. In a recent survey by Deloitte, respondents with more advanced obligation and renewal management capabilities outperformed their goals 45% more often than their peers.

• Cost savings and risk reduction: Missed deadlines can lead to financial penalties, legal disputes, and compliance failures. Obligation Management prevents unnecessary costs and helps organizations stay in control of their commitments.

Obligation management as a practice also strengthens trust with partners, vendors, and customers overall because it shows that you will deliver on your contractual commitments. When obligations are managed seamlessly, businesses can avoid disputes and build stronger, more reliable relationships.

Who benefits from smarter obligation management?

Every department plays a role in contract execution, and each has unique obligation management needs. Here’s a breakdown of how different teams across your organization can see success through obligation management.

• Legal and compliance: Help ensure contract and regulatory compliance with automated tracking and centralized oversight.

• Procurement: Stay on top of supplier commitments, avoid unwanted renewals, and enforce contract terms.

• Finance and revenue operations: Prevent missed payments and optimize cash flow by tracking financial obligations.

• Sales and customer success: Monitor renewals and commitments to drive retention and customer satisfaction.

By leveraging Obligation Management within Docusign IAM, these teams can align on a single intelligent source of truth, eliminating the risks and inefficiencies of decentralized tracking.

By bringing intelligence and automation to obligation management, Docusign helps your business avoid missing critical deadlines, losing revenue due to poor tracking, or putting their compliance at risk. With Docusign Obligation Management, organizations now have the intelligent tools to manage agreements seamlessly from signature to fulfillment.

Ready to take control of your contract obligations? Contact Docusign today for a demo.