In this stage, you can manage the Agreement Negotiation process. You can use the X-Author Contracts Word add-in to create and negotiate an agreement, which is designed to help streamline the process of maintaining agreements and associated agreement and clause templates. As a Contract Negotiator, you coordinate changes to the agreement that might occur over the course of agreement negotiation. These changes are generally concerned with finalizing the process in accordance with company policies and legal requirements. You can perform the following:

  • Amend and save contract agreements or proposals in Salesforce
  • Highlight reconcilable data
  • Reconcile agreement or proposal records
  • View chatter feeds from within Microsoft Word
  • Share content and document to Salesforce chatter
  • Negotiate contracts of multiple languages
  • Create reminder tasks or schedule appointment events in relation to the opened agreement or proposal document
  • Redline and store versions of the document during negotiations
  • Compare different versions of agreements or proposals side by side

For example, if your agreement document contains the Agreement End Date as a smart field, and your customer wants to extend the Agreement End Date, you can do one of the following:

  • Accept the change and Reconcile the change back to Salesforce.
  • Deny the change, save it with or without Redlines and send it back to your customer.

For more details refer to the X-Author Contracts documentation.

Prerequisite

You must have an existing agreement document generated in doc or docx format. The generated document must have been sent to the customer for review.

To negotiate an agreement

  1. Next to your Agreement document received from your customer in the Notes & Attachments related list, click View

  2. Open the Agreement document in Microsoft Word. If the document opens in Protected View, click Enable Editing to continue with the negotiation phase.
  3. On the toolbar, click X-Author Contracts.
  4. From the Access ribbon group, click Connect and login with your salesforce.com credentials.
  5. Click Check-Out > This document.
  6. Check your customer's redlined changes in the agreement document.
  7. After finalizing the changes, from the Versions ribbon group, click Check-In.
  8. Do one of the following actions from the Save drop-down list:
    • To save the agreement document with redlines in order to send it to the customer again, select With Redlines.
      X-Author Contracts automatically renames the agreement document as agreement document name_version number_Redlines.
    • To save the agreement document without redlines, select Without Redlines.
      X-Author Contracts automatically renames the agreement document as agreement document name_version number_Clean.
    • To save and override the changes of the agreement document and reflect them in the same document, select the Final - to be signed option and select the Reconcile Document checkbox.
    • To save the agreement document separately with new changes, select the Final - to be signed option. Use Compare to track the changes in the different versions of the agreement document.
      X-Author Contracts automatically renames the agreement document as agreement document name_version number_Final.

    The Include Watermark checkbox remains enabled for With Redlines and Without Redlines options and the Create PDF attachment checkbox remains enabled for the Final - to be signed option of the Save drop-down list.

  9. Click Save.
  10. Click Refresh in your browser to see the changes. This action updates the agreement version in the repository and activity history.

A new version of the negotiated agreement document is saved in the Notes & Attachments related list. The finalized agreement document can now be sent to the customer for signature.