Nearly half of contract professionals spend an average of 45 minutes searching for a single contract, according to DocuSign‘s own research. But that’s not a search problem, but a filing one and it starts the moment a contract leaves SharePoint.
Most organizations manage the front end of contract management reasonably well. Drafting happens in SharePoint. Internal approvals move through email. The contract goes to DocuSign for signature. But once it’s fully executed, the return path breaks down. Nobody files the signed version back into the system. It lands in the requester’s inbox, stays there, and the audit trail ends.
Multiply that across every vendor agreement, client contract, and compliance document your organization handles in a year. Then ask yourself what happens when an auditor asks for the full chain of activity from first draft to countersigned copy?
For most organizations, that question has no clean answer.
Why the SharePoint/DocuSign gap exists — and why it's hard to fix
The core problem is structural. DocuSign and SharePoint don’t talk to each other by default. Once a document enters the DocuSign environment, it completes its journey there. The executed version doesn’t automatically return to the SharePoint library it came from. Someone has to remember to download it, file it manually, and link it back to the original. In practice, that step gets skipped.
The issue is compounded by the tools many organizations have in place. SharePoint-hosted contract management apps — once a common workaround — are being deprecated by Microsoft. Organizations still running them are on borrowed time. And even the tools that are still working tend to carry the same structural weaknesses: permissions managed at the template level rather than the document level, metadata fields that look reportable but aren’t, and a DocuSign process that remains entirely manual from start to finish.
Cloudwell’s Microsoft 365 specialist developer Mike Ostrander, who recently built a new contract management system for a large US-based investment organization, describes what that looks like in practice. “Our client had to set up permissions for templates, so they ended up creating tons and tons of templates just in order to meet the permissions requirements. Essentially, they were working around the tool.”
The reporting problem ran even deeper — and the client didn’t fully understand by how much until Cloudwell explained what was happening under the hood. “When we explained how it actually worked — that when you make your own field, it’s not actually making a field, it just stores a bunch of gobbledygook inside a block of text — they were really happy about how we were going to built it differently,” Mike said.
The result of these compounding issues is an organization that can draft contracts efficiently, negotiate them by email, and execute them through DocuSign — but can’t answer a basic audit question about where any given contract is, who approved it, or what version was finally signed.
The Contract Manager Pro app Cloudwell built
The investment organization came to Cloudwell with a clear brief: replace a deprecated tool, give the contract team more control over the process, and build something they could maintain in Microsoft 365 themselves without constant IT involvement.
The Contract Manager Pro was born. A solution Cloudwell designed and built to live entirely within Microsoft 365. SharePoint provides the foundation, Azure Document Intelligence handles intake, Power Automate manages the workflow, and DocuSign is integrated directly into the approval chain — so the loop that was previously broken now closes automatically.
How Contract Manager Pro works
The process begins when a user creates a contract from a template. The system supports multiple contract types, each with its own configurable fields and approval requirements. Before the user fills in a single field, the contract file is passed to Azure Document Intelligence, which reads the document and automatically extracts key metadata: start date, end date, contract value, and a plain-English description. The form pre-populates. Manual data entry is reduced from step one.
From there, the contract moves through a defined approval chain. Each contract type can be configured with the gates it needs — department approver, legal, COO — and contracts that don’t require a particular approval stage simply skip it.
Permissions at individual document level
The key difference from legacy tools is how permissions work. Rather than managing SharePoint permission groups at the template level, the system handles access at the individual document level. You specify who needs to see the contract when you create it. The system handles the rest.
“Anybody can go in and add a contract, but they can’t look at contracts — they can only look at their own,” Mike explains. “Based on who you put into the metadata — this person needs to approve it, this person needs to approve it — it then assigns permissions to those specific people for that specific file.”
No template sprawl. No SharePoint admin involvement. No workarounds.
When the contract reaches final internal approval, it triggers automatically in DocuSign via Power Automate. The right person receives a DocuSign envelope, signs it, and the executed document comes straight back into SharePoint — filed alongside the original, under the same record, with a complete activity log tracking every status change throughout the process.
As Cloudwell’s CEO Pat McGown puts it: “Documents often start in SharePoint, but once you introduce DocuSign, they never come back in. Our Contract Manager Pro solution handles it all. You start the contract there, send it to DocuSign, and once it’s fully executed, it comes right back in. All in one place.”
The reporting fix nobody knew they needed
One of the less obvious wins from this build was around reporting — and it turned out to matter more than the client had anticipated.
The previous tool allowed users to create custom metadata fields. What it didn’t make clear was that those fields weren’t stored as real SharePoint columns. They were buried in a block of text the tool could read but Power BI couldn’t. Running any kind of meaningful contract analytics meant custom development work every time.
Cloudwell’s Contract Manager Pro uses native SharePoint content types throughout. Every metadata field is a real column — immediately reportable, filterable, and exportable to Excel using tools the team already has. And if the contract team wants to add a new field, they can do it themselves through a SharePoint list form without raising a ticket or involving IT.
“We set it up in a way where they’re able to take ownership over it with just a SharePoint form,” Mike says. “It’s not difficult — they just follow a few steps.”
For organizations in regulated sectors, this matters beyond day-to-day convenience. Proper information architecture means that when a compliance audit comes, the data you need is structured, queryable, and already in the right place. You’re not building a report from scratch under pressure.
The Copilot capability that came as a bonus
Because the Contract Manager Pro solution is built on a native SharePoint document library — rather than a proprietary data store — it inherits Microsoft 365 Copilot agent capability without any additional build work.
Users with a Copilot license can create an agent trained on the contract library and query it in plain language. Which contracts are expiring this quarter? What’s the total value of agreements with a particular vendor? Which documents are still sitting at COO approval stage?
Critically, the agent operates within SharePoint’s existing permission model. It can only surface contracts the querying user is authorized to see. Nothing leaves the tenant. “It understands the permissions of the person using it,” Mike explains. “It uses Microsoft Graph, and it cannot access anything you can’t access.”
It wasn’t in scope. It came as a consequence of building in the right place from the start.
The CFO asked for more features. That says everything.
The system has just been shipped, and early feedback has been positive.
The biggest immediate win was permissions. The ability to specify exactly who sees each contract at the point of creation — without touching SharePoint settings, creating new templates, or asking IT for help — removed a friction point the team had been working around for years. “Now, they don’t even have to think about it,” Mike says.
The second revelation was reporting. Once the team understood that their metadata fields were now real SharePoint columns — reportable in Power BI, exportable to Excel, theirs to extend without development support — they felt in control of the tool in a way they hadn’t experienced with the previous system.
And then there’s the budget holder. As Cloudwell CEO Pat McGown describes, “the person who hates spending money in any organization” — the CFO — hasn’t just approved of the system. They’re actively requesting new features. That’s a reasonably reliable signal that the problem it solved was real.
Could Contract Manager Pro work for your organization?
Contract Manager Pro was built to a specific brief for a specific client. But the underlying architecture is deliberately open-ended.
“If you really just think about what we’re accomplishing here,” Mike says, “we’re collecting some information about something, we’re determining who needs to approve it, and then at a specific point we’re collecting an electronic signature. That’s really what this whole thing is built around.”
The pattern applies across any environment where contracts move through multiple approval stages and need to be auditable end to end: financial services, commercial real estate, healthcare, nonprofits, professional services. Particularly any organization running a deprecated SharePoint contract app, managing permissions through template proliferation, or still relying on a manual download-sign-upload cycle to close the DocuSign loop.
Frequently asked questions about Contract Manager Pro
What is Contract Manager Pro?
Contract Manager Pro is a contract lifecycle management solution built by Cloudwell on Microsoft 365. It manages the full journey of a contract — from creation and internal approvals through to DocuSign signature and final filing — entirely within SharePoint. It was built to solve a problem most Microsoft 365 organizations have but rarely address: executed contracts that never make it back into SharePoint after they’ve been signed.
Does Contract Manager Pro replace DocuSign?
No. It works with DocuSign, not instead of it. The solution integrates DocuSign directly into the SharePoint approval workflow via Power Automate, so contracts go out for signature automatically and come back into SharePoint once fully executed. If your organization already pays for DocuSign, that investment stays in place.
Do we need to leave SharePoint to use it?
No. The entire contract lifecycle — creation, approval routing, signature, filing — takes place within SharePoint and Microsoft 365. There’s no separate platform to log into or manage.
What happens to contracts after they’re signed?
The fully executed document is automatically returned to SharePoint and filed alongside the original, under the same record. A complete activity log tracks every status change from first draft to countersigned copy.
Can we control who sees each contract?
Yes — and this is one of the key differences from legacy tools. Rather than managing permissions at the template level, the system assigns access at the individual document level. You specify who needs to see a contract when you create it. The system handles the rest automatically.
Does it work with Microsoft 365 Copilot?
Yes. Because the solution is built on a native SharePoint document library, it’s Copilot-ready without any additional build work. Users with a Copilot license can query the contract library in plain language — asking about expiry dates, contract values, approval status — within their existing permission boundaries.
Can our team manage it without IT support?
That was a core requirement of the build. The contract team can add new metadata fields, configure templates, and manage the process themselves through a SharePoint list form. No code. No tickets. No IT dependency for day-to-day changes.
Is it only suitable for large organizations?
No. The underlying architecture scales to contract volume rather than organization size. Any business that handles multi-stage contract approvals and needs an auditable end-to-end process is a potential fit.
Which industries is it best suited to?
Any regulated or compliance-conscious environment where contracts need to be traceable — financial services, commercial real estate, healthcare, nonprofits, and professional services are the most obvious fits. But the pattern applies wherever contracts move through approval chains and need to be properly filed.
Can it be adapted for our organization?
Contract Manager Pro was built for a specific client but the architecture is deliberately open-ended. Speak to Cloudwell about what a version configured for your workflows and contract types would look like.
If your contracts are disappearing after DocuSign, it’s time to have a conversation with Cloudwell.