The Hidden Cost of "Good Enough" Tools For Contract and Third-Party Management

"Our spreadsheets work fine."

I hear this a lot. And it's true, in a sense. Spreadsheets do work. Email chains do work. Shared drives do work. Teams manage contracts and third parties this way every day. Things get done. Vendors get onboarded. Contracts get renewed. Audits get completed.

So when someone suggests moving to purpose-built contract and third-party management software, the response is often some version of: "Why would we change what's already working?".

It's a fair question. But it's based on a misleading premise: that "working" and "working well" are the same thing.

The invisible tax of manual contract and third-party management

Here's what "working" actually looks like in most organisations using spreadsheets and email for contract management:

Someone reviews a contract and spots an issue that needs attention. They can't just fix it or start a process right there. They have to draft an email explaining the issue, figure out who needs to be involved, attach the contract or link to it on the shared drive, send it off, and then track the thread as it evolves.

Maybe it takes 10 minutes. Maybe 15 if they need to hunt down the contract file or figure out who should be cc'd.

It's not a disaster. It's just... friction. And it happens dozens of times a week across your team.

Now multiply that by every contract issue, every vendor review, every piece of information someone needs to find, every workflow that needs coordinating. The time adds up, but more importantly, the cognitive load adds up.

This is the invisible tax you pay for "good enough" tools. It doesn't show up on a budget line. It shows up in how people experience their work.

Let's do some math

Let's take a medium-sized organisation managing, say, 500 contracts and 300 third party relationships. Conservative assumptions:

Manual workflow coordination:

• 3 contract amendments/renewals initiated per week via email
• 15 minutes per initiation (drafting email, finding documents, coordinating)
• 12 hours per year just on starting workflows

Data quality cleanup:

• 50 new third parties onboarded per year
• 10% have data entry errors (addresses, Tax IDs, other fields)
• 30 minutes per error to identify, track down correct information, fix, reprocess
• 25 hours per year on preventable data cleanup

Information retrieval:

• Quarterly reporting on contract/third-party activity
• 4 hours per quarter to manually compile information from spreadsheets
• 16 hours per year on pulling information that should be instantly accessible

Performance review coordination:

• Annual third-party performance reviews for 100 key relationships
• 20 minutes per review, coordinating via email, tracking responses, and consolidating feedback
• 33 hours per year on review administration

That's 86 hours per year. More than two full work weeks. For one person.

But here's the thing: this work isn't concentrated in one person. It's distributed across your organisation’s legal team, its procurement team, its finance team, and its compliance team. Everyone pays a small portion of this tax, so it never feels big enough to address.

Until you add it all up.

The coordination overhead

The time calculation actually understates the problem, because it only counts the direct task time. It doesn't count the coordination overhead.

When you manage workflows via email, someone has to:

• Remember to follow up when they don't get responses
• Search through email threads to find status updates
• Manually update whoever asks "what's the status of that contract thing?"
• Reconstruct the decision history when someone new gets involved
• Figure out what's stuck and why

This coordination work is almost invisible because it's woven into everyone's day. A few minutes here checking email. A few minutes there updating a spreadsheet. A quick Slack message asking for status. None of it feels significant in the moment.

But it's constant. And it's what people mean when they say they spent all day "putting out fires" or "dealing with email" and didn't get to their actual work.

The opportunity cost

Here's what that time could be spent on instead:

Building deeper third-party relationships. Understanding vendor capabilities better. Identifying risks earlier. Negotiating better terms. Developing more strategic sourcing approaches. Actually thinking about contract strategy instead of just administering contracts.

The teams we work with consistently say the same thing after moving to Gatekeeper: they didn't realise how much of their time was spent on coordination and administration until they weren't doing it anymore.

That time doesn't disappear. It gets redirected toward work that actually moves the business forward.

What changes with proper systems

Let's revisit those scenarios with purpose-built software:

• Workflow initiation: Someone reviews a contract, spots an issue, clicks "Add to Workflow" right there on the contract record. 30 seconds instead of 15 minutes. The system handles the workflow routing, notifications, and tracking automatically.
• Data quality: Real-time address validation during onboarding catches formatting errors as you type. Tax IDs can be copied directly from W-9s with formatting, the system handles it. Errors get caught at entry instead of being discovered weeks later during payment processing.
• Information retrieval: Need all third parties onboarded in Q3 for a report? Add Creation Date as a column, filter by date range. Two clicks, two minutes. The information was always there, it's just actually accessible now.
• Performance reviews: Set annual or bi-annual performance review cycles aligned with your fiscal calendar. The system sends scorecards when they're due, tracks responses and consolidates feedback. You do the actual evaluation work, not the administrative overhead of managing the process.

Those 86 hours per year? They become maybe 10. And the coordination overhead that was impossible to quantify? It mostly disappears because the system handles it.

"But we'd have to change how we work"

This is the other objection we hear. Moving to a unified contract and third-party management solution means changing processes, training people and adjusting workflows. That feels disruptive.

But here's what's actually disruptive: the constant context-switching, the endless coordination overhead, the preventable errors, the information that should be accessible but isn't.

You're already dealing with disruption. It's just so constant that you've normalised it.

Purpose-built systems don't disrupt your work. They remove the disruption that's already there.

The real cost of "good enough"

Spreadsheets and email are good enough in the sense that work eventually gets done. But they extract a cost that's easy to overlook because it's distributed and ongoing.

Time spent on coordination instead of strategy. Errors that could have been prevented. Information that's harder to access than it should be. People who end their day frustrated that they spent it on administrative overhead instead of meaningful work.

That's the actual cost of "good enough" tools. Not dramatic failure, but constant friction. Not inability to function, but inability to function well.

The question isn't whether your current approach works. It's whether it works as well as it could. And whether the cumulative cost of all that friction is worth what you're saving by not investing in proper systems.

What the math misses

The time calculations I laid out earlier are useful for building a business case, but they miss something important: how it feels to work with tools that fight you versus tools that work with you.

When someone on your team reviews a contract and spots an issue, do they think "I can handle this right now", or do they think "I need to send an email about this"?

That moment of friction, that small decision to defer action because the tools make it annoying, that compounds across your entire organisation.

The best tools don't announce themselves. They just quietly remove the things that were in your way. And you don't fully realise what you were dealing with until it's gone.

Making the shift to Unified Contract and third-Party Management software

If you're reading this and thinking "this sounds like us," you're not alone. Most organisations operate with "good enough" tools because they've always worked this way, or because building proper systems felt too complex or expensive.

But the reality is that "good enough" has its own cost. It's just a distributed, ongoing cost that never feels urgent enough to address.

Until you actually calculate what you're paying for it.

The teams who make the shift to purpose-built contract and third-party management systems don't do it because their spreadsheets stopped working. They do it because they realised that "working" and "working well" are genuinely different things.

And the difference between them is measurable. In time saved. In errors prevented. In information that's accessible when you need it. In people who end their day feeling productive instead of just busy.

Your spreadsheets do work fine. The question is whether "fine" is the standard you want to hold your team to.

If you're ready to see how modern, purpose-built systems can simplify your work and free your team from unnecessary friction, our team at Gatekeeper is here to help.

Start the conversation today, we’ll walk you through what smarter, smoother workflows could look like for your organisation.