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Guide for Entrepreneurs

How to Use a Data Room – A Guide for Dummies

The digital data room works directly with documents, helps to launch complex transactions, controls and manages business flows, and organizes the collaborative work of employees. Here is a guide on how to choose this software in practice. 

Virtual data room: automate the core business operations

In the work of any organization, over time, there is a need to automate some processes. With the growth of production, the number of business processes and information that needs to be controlled increases. And to extract greater benefits and collaborative work, it is necessary to automate the entire enterprise. Automation of business processes of enterprises is a purposeful organization of an autonomous company management system. Moreover, with most company transactions, the data is only collected digitally and made accessible to the prospective buyer. It is done via a professional virtual data room provider who protects the data from unauthorized access. Once the contract has been signed, the data can no longer be changed and is available to both sides in the event of any legal disputes.

A data room is the most effective solution for workflow automation in enterprises. According to statistics, contractual activity takes up to 57% of employees’ working time working with documents, and the organization of its effective work gives the maximum effect. The software allows companies to automate all processes related to deal activities – ensuring the structured storage of contracts and organizing collaborative work on their coordination and control over execution.

Data room capabilities

So, a virtual data room ensures many capabilities for its users:

  • Maintaining information about the company’s contracts in a single repository of documents;
  • Possibility of serial and parallel matching;
  • Maintenance of the register of contracts;
  • Implementation of additional legal actions related to the preparation of the contract and the distribution of tasks between employees of legal entities. department, control, and shift of deadlines;
  • Search for documents, including the search for any word found in the text of the document;
  • Keeping a history of all work processes, completed or not, within the entire system;
  • Creation of an unlimited number of approval routes;
  • Ability to add additional approvers already in the process of approval;
  • Continuous monitoring of the state of the process (current stage of approval; the person considering the application at this stage; the final status of the application);
  • Convenient, secure, and fast access to data, including from mobile devices;
  • Adaptation of the interface to the style of the customer’s portal;
  • Unified database of directories of contractors and roles.

The guide on using data room software

A data room is a legal, organizational and technical framework for sharing data by multiple actors (private companies, public administrations, research institutions, etc.). Within the framework of a data room, the data actors assume one or more of the following five roles: 

  • data users, 
  • data suppliers, 
  • data brokers, 
  • data subjects 
  • beneficiaries. 

The cooperation of the data actors in the data room can be described as follows:

  • The data users receive access to the data they need for their applications (data-based services) via infrastructures and to which they are authorized to use according to the agreement with the data suppliers. 
  • The beneficiaries obtain the data-based services provided by the data users and compensate them for this according to the agreement. 
  • If the data relates to third parties, they always have control over the transfer of their data and their use and participate in the results of data usage.
  • The cooperation between the actors and their data-related activities are embedded in a legal, organizational and technical set of rules jointly defined and enforced by the data cooperation organizations.