Contracts Are Assets, Not Paperwork: A CFO's View of Agreement Lifecycle Management

At quarter-end, the finance team needs to know whether a major supply contract includes an FX-linked price adjustment clause. The answer sits in a file called "HD_NCC_final_v3_banky.pdf", buried in the inbox of a procurement officer who left in May. It takes two days to find, and the reconciliation window has already closed.

This is not unusual. It reflects a common habit: companies treat contracts as records to file, when every contract is an asset to manage.

A study published in August 2025 by World Commerce & Contracting (WorldCC) estimates that the average business loses about 9% of annual revenue to poor contract management, through leakage, disputes, and missed opportunities. In industries with complex supply chains or heavy compliance demands, the figure exceeds 15%. The same study puts the loss for a billion-dollar company at more than USD 90 million a year. No CFO would accept a cost of that size sitting outside the management report.

Why contracts end up treated as paperwork

In accounting, contracts usually travel with vouchers: they justify revenue recognition and expense entries, then go into a filing cabinet. Once the transaction is booked, few people open them again.

The bigger problem is ownership. The legal department drafts and reviews. The Procurement or sales negotiates with clients. The Finance department pays for the invoice. Each function holds a piece, and nobody holds the whole lifecycle. In our experience, most value leaks through the gaps between departments, not within any single step.

On top of that, a contract's value lives in its clauses, not in the signed PDF. A scanned copy will not tell you when the renewal is due, how much the late-delivery penalty is, or how much of the minimum volume commitment remains.

Four value streams a CFO should see in every contract

Through a financial lens, every contract holds at least four things:

1. Cash flow: pricing, payment schedules, discounts, index-linked or FX-linked price adjustments. This feeds straight into the cash forecast.

2. Obligations: minimum purchase commitments, service levels (SLAs), warranties, guarantees. Many never appear on the balance sheet, yet they still tie up company money.

3. Options: renewal, early termination, renegotiation rights. An option only has value if the company knows it exists before the exercise deadline.

4. Risk: penalties, liability caps, governing law, force majeure terms.

When these four streams are locked in unstructured text, the CFO is running an asset portfolio without a register.

Where value leaks across the agreement lifecycle

Losses rarely come from one big mistake. They build up at every stage:

• Creation: outdated templates, payment terms that drift from policy, discounts above approval limits that nobody catches.

• Approval: sign-off via email or chat with no audit trail. When a dispute arises, nobody can prove who agreed to what.

• Signing: waiting for wet signatures and couriers between branches delays the effective date, and with it, revenue recognition.

• Execution: delivery, acceptance and invoicing milestones go untracked, so penalties that should be collected are missed, or substandard services get paid in full.

• Renewal: contracts auto-renew at old prices, or termination notice windows pass because no one remembered the date.

• Archiving: at audit time, the team digs through cabinets and inboxes to prove a single transaction.

Our view: renewal is where money disappears most quietly, because no one feels they did anything wrong.

Managing contracts as an asset portfolio

The shift from "filing records" to "managing assets" does not start with software. It starts with the questions you ask. A simple test: can your team answer, within 10 minutes, "How many contracts come up for renewal next quarter, what is their total value, and who owns each one?" If not, your contracts are still paperwork.

A well-managed contract portfolio needs:

• A central register: every contract in one place, with key data extracted into searchable fields.

• Clear ownership: each contract has one person accountable across its life, not just the signatory.

• Tracked metrics: time from draft to signature, share of contracts on standard templates, value of obligations due within 90 days, value of contracts approaching renewal.

• Proactive alerts: the system flags notice dates before they pass, not after.

The legal framework is ready. Governance is the open question

In Vietnam, most legal barriers to electronic contracts are gone. The Law on Electronic Transactions No. 20/2023/QH15, effective July 1, 2024, confirms the legal validity of data messages and electronic signatures. Decree 337/2025/ND-CP on electronic labor contracts, effective July 1, 2026, brings employment relationships into the digital environment as well. The 2015 Law on Accounting requires accounting documents used directly for bookkeeping to be kept for at least 10 years, and its implementing regulations permit electronic storage.

In other words, "Can we sign electronically?" is no longer the question. The CFO's question now is whether the data inside contracts is actually being used to make decisions.

Kyta ALM: turning contracts from documents into operating data

Kyta ALM (Agreement Lifecycle Management) by FPT IS is built for exactly this problem: managing agreements from creation, approval, negotiation and signing through to archiving and post-signature tracking, for both internal transactions and those with external partners.

For CFOs, the value shows up in five places:

• Control from the start: standard templates and authority-based approval flows are configured with no-code/low-code tools, with no wait for IT to rebuild systems.

• Fast, legally sound signing: Kyta Signature supports remote digital signatures with timestamping (TSA) and long-term validation (LTV), plus e-contract certification with the CeCA verified mark from the Ministry of Industry and Trade.

• Counterparty verification: Kyta eKYC checks identity data against Ministry of Public Security records, reducing the risk of signing with the wrong person or entity.

• Data instead of files: Kyta Intelligent uses AI to extract clauses, values and deadlines, feeding them into the Kyta eCLM repository for search, alerts and reporting.

• Real-time visibility: every stakeholder sees the same agreement status, instead of chasing each other by email.

More than 4,500 businesses have chosen Kyta Platform for digital identity and electronic contracting.

Where to start in the next 90 days

You do not need to digitize everything at once. A practical roadmap for CFOs:

1. Weeks 1 to 3: inventory your 50 highest-value contracts. Record renewal dates, payment terms and termination rights. This step almost always turns up a few surprises.

2. Weeks 4 to 8: pick one high-volume flow (procurement or sales) and digitize it end to end, from standard template to approval and signature.

3. Weeks 9 to 12: set three metrics (time to signature, value up for renewal, obligations falling due) and add them to the monthly management report.

Contracts do not become assets on their own. They become assets when the business can measure them.

Contact Kyta Platform for a consultation

Website: kyta.fpt.com · Hotline: 1900 636 121 (ext. 2) · Email: support.kyta@fpt.com