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# Agreement searching, reporting, and orchestration use case

> Discover how Docusign Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) helps organizations search, report, and automate actions across all their contracts.

\_As organizations grow, agreements become scattered across systems. Locating the right document, identifying the critical data, and acting on it before deadlines can be complex and risky.

With the Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) platform, teams can search, report, and orchestrate actions across their entire contract portfolio. This enables faster renewals, accurate compliance reviews, and proactive decision-making powered by connected agreement data.\_

#### Problem statement

Every enterprise depends on agreements: from technology licenses and vendor contracts to NDAs and master service agreements. However, as companies grow, their agreements become fragmented across departments, systems, and file formats. Procurement stores some agreements in shared drives. Legal houses others in contract management tools. Finance keeps versions tied to purchase orders. The result is a disjointed, obscured view of an organization’s most important business data: its agreements.

Most organizations lack a single, searchable source of truth for their contracts. Agreements are saved as PDFs or other static file formats, and scans are scattered in multiple locations (physical and digital), with inconsistent naming conventions and incomplete metadata. Searching for a specific vendor, clause, or renewal date is time-consuming or downright impossible, even with manual digging.

With trapped agreement data and incongruent workstreams, analytics and reporting become an exercise in spreadsheet chaos. Manual reporting leads to outdated data, missed renewal deadlines, and reactive decision-making. When a contract auto-renews without review, compliance begins to slip, and opportunities to renegotiate deals are lost.

Even if teams can locate the right contracts, follow-up actions like reviews, approvals, renewals, or terminations occur through email threads, direct messages, or in isolated systems. Legal, procurement, and vendor-management teams each have their own tools, systems, and timelines, making coordination slow and error-prone.

This fragmentation creates blind spots across the agreement lifecycle. A legal team might approve a renewal, but Procurement isn’t notified. Finance might close a PO without realizing the contract is still active. The lack of collaboration between teams results in delays, redundant work, and compliance gaps. Data visibility is crucial to profit, and cross-functional visibility is crucial to productivity.

Every contract represents both risk and opportunity; organizations need a way to see, understand, and act on their agreements at scale.

#### How Docusign for Developers can help

To justify adopting a new approach, organizations need more than incremental improvements. They need 10x utility: faster access to agreement data, clearer insights, and a measurable ROI that makes the switch worth it. Docusign for Developers gives you the building blocks to turn disconnected agreement data into connected, automated workflows. By connecting Docusign IAM, organizations can automate the full cycle of agreement searching, reporting, and orchestration.

* [Docusign Agreement Manager](https://www.docusign.com/products/platform/agreement-manager) **smart agreement repository**: Agreement Manager not only provides centralized storage for agreements but also uses AI to categorize them, extract key data, and help you manage contract obligations. Additional features include comprehensive search capabilities, robust reporting, and automated notifications.

  ![Agreement Manager smart repository](/_fern-files/docusign.docs.buildwithfern.com/4a9e3701eb5579b8151a702e7e79c4f0009647139f0f5ca8dec445a0e7cbec6f/assets/img/ctf/5c3SGWkgXmZo59e9gWUtil-gif.gif)
* [Agreement Manager API](/docs/agreement-manager-api): Use the Agreement Manager API to create a unified view of your organization’s agreements. You can query by metadata, keywords, or clauses to locate specific contracts, extract key fields like payment status or renewal date, and display them in your own dashboards.
* [Workflow Builder workflows](https://www.docusign.com/products/platform/workflow-builder): For teams that want to move fast without writing code, Workflow Builder workflows provides a visual interface for building agreement processes. You can define steps such as signature requests, data collection, and data management, and even incorporate branching rules, all within a no-code environment.

  ![screenshot of workflow builder](/_fern-files/_img/62817ca8f97d0823cf18d45724fbb14c6f07f572fb2ad432d7f848d443895cbb.webp)
* [Workflow Builder API](/docs/workflow-builder-api): The Workflow Builder API enables automating the next step in the agreement lifecycle. Once you identify agreements that require action, you can trigger workflows programmatically. These workflows can route tasks to the correct teams, send notifications, and automatically update contract data as each step is completed. By handling workflow logic in Workflow Builder, the complexity of the business process is decoupled from your application code. This means that future changes, new approval paths, or customizations can be implemented without redeploying or modifying your codebase.
* [Extension apps](/extension-apps/extension-apps-101): For deeper customization, extension apps enable you to extend IAM capabilities to fit your business logic. You can build integrations that sync contract data with ERP or finance systems, generate reports in real time, or enforce approval steps based on custom triggers.

  ![Public extension apps listed in the App Center](/_fern-files/_img/6ab96667a42ac99c36c6ad2415d79972bd2887fe256b4bcbbefb8f1ec6e9fa4f.webp)

By combining Agreement Manager for visibility and Workflow Builder for orchestration, developers can provide business users with a single source of truth for all agreement activity. This means fewer missed renewals, faster reviews, and consistent data across every system through APIs and no-code tools that are easy to integrate, scale, and secure.

Most organizations begin with agreements siloed across systems and departments. With Agreement Manager, Workflow Builder, and extension apps, those silos dissolve. Agreement data becomes searchable, connected, and ready to power new insights for sales, procurement, and finance. The result is not just compliance efficiency, but a complete transformation in how organizations uncover savings, upsell opportunities, and revenue potential hidden within their contracts.

#### Example workflow

Scenario:

A contract administrator needs to identify vendor agreements that have been executed but not yet paid out to reconcile pending obligations across departments and ensure vendor payments align with contract terms.

Steps:

1. **Search:** The administrator logs in to the organization’s Agreement Manager integration and searches for all active vendor agreements with the payment status field set to **Pending**. The integration calls the Agreement Manager API, which returns 120 results, sorted by vendor, spend category, and business unit.
2. **Analyze:** Within the results, the administrator filters by payment terms and due dates to identify past-due agreements. The Agreement Manager integration highlights contracts with high-value outstanding balances and flags any with clauses requiring immediate payment or penalty interest.
3. **Trigger:** A Workflow Builder API integration automatically triggers a payment verification workflow. It routes each unpaid agreement to Finance for review and sends a compliance check to Legal if payment terms are being breached.
4. **Collaborate:** Stakeholders in Finance, Procurement, and Legal receive task notifications. Finance verifies invoices and updates payment records; Procurement confirms that vendor services were delivered; and Legal reviews any exceptions or penalty clauses.
5. **Complete:** Once the cross-functional tasks have been completed, Workflow Builder updates each contract’s payment status in Agreement Manager and marks the workflow as resolved. Dashboards refresh automatically, showing how many contracts have been reconciled, the total outstanding spend, and any contracts flagged for escalation.

#### Resources for developers

To get you started on building your own agreement searching, reporting, and orchestration solution using Docusign for Developers, here are a few useful resources.

* [Automating Agreement Workflows with Docusign Workflow Builder Developer AMA](https://community.docusign.com/general-74/faq-automating-agreement-workflows-with-docusign-maestro-from-our-developer-ama-25669): This community thread outlines insights from a developer Ask Me Anything session focused on workflow automation using Docusign Workflow Builder. It covers real-world questions on how to build, trigger, and manage agreement workflows with APIs, embed workflow steps into apps, and handle edge cases.
* [Agreement Desk: A Collaboration Space for the Contract Process](https://www.docusign.com/blog/agreement-desk): This article introduces Agreement Desk, an agreement hub that expedites request intake, centralizes collaboration, and brings AI-powered automation to your agreement lifecycle.
* [Extension apps 101 overview](/extension-apps/extension-apps-101): This guide walks you through the fundamentals of building and deploying extension apps. It covers concepts and architecture, APIs, and best practices.
* [Insights sample app](https://insights.sampleapps.docusign.com): This live sample demonstrates how the Agreement Manager API can be used to list agreements and retrieve detailed information from your contract portfolio.
* [Use Case: Give Users Permission to View All Agreements in an Account](https://support.docusign.com/s/document-item?language=en_US\&bundleId=pqz1702943441912\&topicId=chh1702944587769.html&_LANG=enus): This article explains how to set up Agreement Manager for team collaboration. It covers how to share agreements, manage permissions, and ensure everyone has access to the correct documents during the review process.
* [How to trigger a Workflow Builder workflow](/docs/workflow-builder-api/how-to/trigger-workflow): This example demonstrates how to use the Workflow Builder API to programmatically launch a workflow from your application. Once triggered, the workflow can be embedded in an iframe within your web app to provide an integrated system for your team.
* [How to get a specific agreement](/docs/agreement-manager-api/how-to/get-specific-agreement): This example shows how to use the Agreement Manager API to programmatically find a specific agreement by its ID.
* Related videos:

  * [Build Secure Custom Integrations with Docusign Private Extension Apps](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-WYLfjzaWM)
  * [How to Use Agreement Data for Analytics, Workflows, and Automation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dl6eGrNiUgk)