Counterparty Initiated Contracts Overview

Not every contract starts inside your own organisation. Vendors, clients or partners often send over a draft agreement, or even a fully signed contract. Zoho Contracts handles this through counterparty initiated contracts, letting you import, negotiate, execute and manage externally initiated agreements through their full lifecycle.

What are counterparty initiated contracts

These are contracts created and shared by an external party, which you import into Zoho Contracts for internal review, collaboration, signature tracking and post-execution management. You can import a contract in two states: as a draft, shared for review and negotiation before signing, or as signed, already executed and ready for post-signature tracking.

The workflow

1. Importing the contract

Fill in the contract details form, upload the document, and define its current state, draft or signed.

2. Negotiation

For draft contracts, review and suggest edits using in-document comments, collaborate internally before sharing with the counterparty, and continue discussions until you reach agreement on the terms.

3. Collaboration

Team members and stakeholders can edit the draft document and add contextual comments, to ensure the content matches both internal requirements and the external agreement.

4. Signature process

Once both parties agree, upload the signed document shared by the counterparty, add signer details, and attach the digital signature certificate if applicable. Zoho Contracts automatically marks the contract as Active based on its effective date.

5. Post-execution management

Once active, the contract can be managed within Zoho Contracts just like an internally initiated one, including:

• Obligations: assign and track them to responsible owners for timely execution.
• Renewals and extensions: capture and manage details when the counterparty renews or extends the contract.
• Amendments: update the contract with amendment details as they occur.
• Termination: log the termination request or document details when the contract ends.