Obligation Management

Obligation management plays a critical role in Contract Life Cycle Management (CLM) by ensuring that both parties engaged in a contract fulfill their respective commitments throughout the contract's duration. It involves tracking, monitoring, and managing obligations, ensuring they are met on time and within the agreed-upon conditions.

You can add new obligations to the contracts and manage them. For more details, see Creating an Obligation and Viewing the Obligation List.

To ensure that obligations are created for contracts and tracked, you need to link obligations with relevant clauses through the Clause Library. For more information, see Associating Obligations with a Clause .

If the clauses linked with obligations are added to a contract template and a contract document is generated using this template, obligations are automatically added to the contract. You can view the obligations created for a contract in its Activity timeline. You can view detailed information about the obligations in the Obligations link for the contract. You can also add new obligations to a contract (without a linkage to any clause).

Conga CLM supports the following features to manage obligations:

Viewing the obligations list
Creating an obligation
Update an obligation
Delete an obligation

Recurring Obligations

Many contractual obligations must be fulfilled on a recurring basis, such as monthly invoice reviews, quarterly compliance audits, or annual performance evaluations. Manually creating these recurring obligations for each cycle is time-consuming and increases the risk of missed deadlines, inconsistent tracking, and compliance gap

Conga CLM allows creating recurring obligations to automate the creation of obligations based on predefined schedules. Instead of manually recreating obligations for every recurrence cycle, users can configure an obligation once and define how often it should repeat. The system then automatically generates future obligation instances according to the configured schedule.

You can define flexible recurrence schedules such as daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually, or custom intervals based on business requirements. Once configured, the system creates new obligation instances automatically at the specified intervals.

Generated contract documents also display recurring obligation schedules as natural language sentences in the "Due Date" column of the Obligation table. Only obligations with the "Print on Contract" option enabled appear, and recurrence frequency is shown as One Time, Monthly, Quarterly, or Custom.

To support timely fulfillment, you can configure reminder notifications for obligations. These reminders alert users of upcoming due dates and overdue obligations, improving visibility into pending commitments and helping teams stay on schedule.

The system also supports recurrence exceptions, allowing users to skip, modify, or cancel individual recurring instances without affecting the overall recurrence pattern.

Each recurring obligation instance is recorded in the recurrence history, giving users visibility into past, current, and upcoming obligations.

Obligation Assignee and Reviewer

For obligations, assignees and reviewers play distinct roles, and their identification depends on whether the contract is buy-side or sell-side.

Buy-side contracts: In these types of contracts, the buyer (the party acquiring goods, services, or rights) takes the primary responsibility for ensuring that obligations tied to receiving and paying for products or services are met.

Buy-side assignees
- The buyer typically assigns obligations related to payment, receiving goods/services, or verifying the products/services received.
- Internal teams like procurement, finance, or legal departments might be the assignees depending on the specific obligation (e.g., payment approval, delivery acceptance).
Buy-side reviewers
- The seller’s performance is often reviewed by the buyer’s designated personnel (e.g., procurement officers, contract managers).
- Internal reviewers, such as quality assurance teams or legal personnel, ensure that the products/services provided meet the agreed-upon terms.

Sell-side contracts: In sell-side contracts, the seller (the party providing goods, services, or rights) has the responsibility for fulfilling obligations like delivering the promised goods/services, meeting quality standards, and adhering to the timelines.

Sell-side assignees
- The seller is responsible for performing obligations like delivering goods, services, or intellectual property, adhering to quality standards, and fulfilling timelines.
- Internal teams such as sales, logistics, or production departments would typically act as assignees for fulfilling these obligations.
Sell-side reviewers
- The buyer would act as the reviewer, ensuring that the seller’s performance meets the specified terms and standards (e.g., ensuring timely delivery, verifying product quality).
- In certain cases, third-party inspection or auditing might be part of the review process to confirm that the contract obligations are met.

Contract Template Configuration for Obligations

When you add an obligation to a contract, you can decide whether to include it in the contract or not. To include it in the document, you must enable Print on Contract for the obligation.

Obligation-related fields are stored in the Contract Obligation object. The administrator must insert required obligation-related fields from this object in the contract template with the following Insert as a table option. For these fields, select the following options under the Fields tab:

Enable the Smart Fields toggle button
In the Repeat Table option, add a condition with the parameters:Conditions on Row
- In the Field list, click Contract Obligation and select Print on Contract.
- In the Operator list, select Equal To.
- In the Value list, select True.

For more information, see Inserting Fields in a Template as a Table.

After you have configured the template and enabled the Print to Contract toggle for the obligations in the contract, you must generate the contract document. If the contract document was already generated before adding an obligation to it, you must regenerate it to include the new obligation.

Viewing the Obligation List

The Obligations link in the contract details provides a comprehensive view of all the obligations related to the contract.

Navigate to the contract details page.
Click Obligations under LINKS.
Click Definition.

A list of obligations associated with the contract is displayed, along with an option to create an obligation for the contract.

Creating an Obligation

You can add an obligation at a contract level for several reasons, depending on the nature of the contract. You can associate comments or attachments with an obligation by uploading documents during obligation creation. You can add, edit, or delete obligations to a contract until it is in the Activated status. You cannot perform obligation management actions after activation, expiration, cancellation, or termination of the contract.

Note:

A contract administrator can use the Edit Page button in the page header to customize the page layout of the Contract Details page in CX Studio. This allows them to add or remove standard and custom fields. For more information about editing page layouts, see Page Layout Configuration in CX Studio.

Click Obligations in LINKS for the contract.
Click Definition.
A list of obligations created for the contract is displayed.
Click Create New Obligation.
Specify the Obligation Name. For example, "Payment Obligation", "Confidentiality Obligation", "Warranty Obligation", etc.
Select the Obligation Type.
Select the Accountable Party to indicate whether the party responsible for obligation fulfillment is internal or external. Internal accountable party is a person or a department within the organization who is ultimately responsible for fulfilling an internal obligation (for example, CFO for financial reporting, HR for training). External accountable party is a third-party organization or entity outside of the company that is responsible for fulfilling an external obligation (for example, supplier for materials, regulatory agency for compliance).
The Print on Contract toggle determines whether the obligation is included in the contract document. The system automatically enables the Print on Contract toggle when the accountable party is external and automatically disables it when the accountable party is internal. Modify the setting if required.

Note: The newly added obligation is included in the contract document only when you generate or regenerate the contract document. Before document generation, ensure that required obligation related fields are inserted into the contract template. For more information, see Contract Template Configuration for Obligations.
Select the Assignee Type. This field is applicable to sell-side contracts. Select whether the obligation should be assigned to an individual user or a user group.
Select Assignee for the obligation. If the assignee is an internal user that does not have access to the contract, a confirmation message prompting you to grant access is displayed. Click Yes to grant access. If this is the first obligation being created for the contract, the system displays the access confirmation prompt regardless of whether the assignee already has access (for example, through the View All Contracts permission).

Note: The Assignee list for sell-side contract obligations consists of internal users. For buy-side contract obligations, the Assignee list consists of active supplier contacts or accounts contacts. For more information, see Obligation Assignee and Reviewer.
Select the Reviewer Type. This field is applicable only to buy-side contracts. Select whether an individual user or a user group should review the obligation.
Select Reviewer for the obligation. If the contract is sell-side and the reviewer is an internal user that does not have access to the contract, a confirmation message prompting you to grant access is displayed. Click Yes to grant access.

Note: The Reviewer list for sell-side contract obligations consists of active supplier contacts or active contracts. For buy-side contract obligations, the Reviewer list consists of internal system users. For more information, see Obligation Assignee and Reviewer.
Select Clause Reference for the obligation.
Select the Priority for the obligation based on the order in which obligations within the contract should be fulfilled.

To create this obligation as recurring, choose one of the following four frequency options. The form fields update dynamically based on your selection.

Frequency	Displayed Fields
One Time (default)	Due Date Note: The Due Date field is only visible when the frequency is One Time. For all other frequencies, Start Date replaces it. If you have not provided the obligation due date at this time, the system automatically inserts contract end date, if it is available, on saving the obligation. If the contract end date is not available, the obligation due date field is left blank.
Monthly	Start Date (Due Date) End Date
Quarterly	Start Date (Due Date) End Date
Custom	Start Date (Due Date) End Date Repeat Frequency Interval Type (Days / Weeks / Months / Years)

Enter comments for the obligation.
You can upload supporting documents and templates that can be used to fulfill the obligation. For example, for an obligation related to environmental regulations, the environmental agency may need to submit an emission report in a particular format. You can upload such documents to the obligation record. Drag and drop or browse for files to attach to the obligation.

Note: You can upload one or more files in .xls, .xlsx, .txt, .doc, .docx, .rtf, or .pdf format. The uploaded file size should not exceed 100 MB.
Click Save.

The obligation is added to the obligation list in the Obligations link. An audit trail is maintained for any operation performed on the obligation. For recurring obligations, a recurring summary is displayed as natural language sentences.

A notification is sent to the assignee and reviewer user or user group informing them of the obligation assignment.

You can edit an obligation until the contract is activated. To edit an obligation, click the Obligation Name link in the list, click Edit and then click Definition tab. You can change the assignee or reviewer of the obligation, upload new attachments or delete existing attachments while editing an obligation.

To delete an obligation, click the kebab menu icon and click Delete.

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