When choosing a contract repository, what level of inaccuracy are you willing to accept?

Most businesses instinctively answer "none”, but few stop to consider what that actually means. Accuracy isn’t just a simple box to tick; it’s an ongoing, relentless process that goes far beyond extracting data points from contracts.

Many vendors gloss over this complexity, promising accuracy without defining it or explaining how they plan to maintain it. The result is a repository that sounds reliable, until the moment you actually depend on it.

You're about to inherit a hidden workload

Accuracy doesn’t just happen — it's a continuous effort requiring more work than most businesses anticipate. The wrong solution, especially one overly reliant on automation or manual input, leaves your team with a workload they’re neither prepared or equipped to manage.

The two unavoidable truths about accuracy

Truth #1: Someone has to verify accuracy — "set it and forget it" is a myth

Even the most advanced automation and AI systems inevitably leave gaps. True accuracy isn't achieved passively — it requires careful human oversight.

Maintaining accuracy involves actively managing a host of different sub-processes, including:

• Continuous validation of data points.
• Structured organisation of contracts, with enforced naming conventions and clearly defined relationships.
• Proactive resolution of ambiguous or conflicting terms.
• Filtering out irrelevant documents, drafts, or outdated agreements that obscure critical information.

Without clear responsibility for performing these tasks, errors accumulate until they become costly mistakes.

For more on why AI can’t replace human oversight, see Why we use Humans and AI.

Truth #2: Every accuracy gap your vendor leaves behind falls on you

If your vendor doesn't take responsibility for all the critical processes that feed into ensuring accuracy, your team becomes the default safety net.

Solutions promising full automation often quietly shift this burden onto you. Rather than freeing you up to focus on strategic, high-value tasks, your team gets trapped in an endless cycle of error correction and manual data entry.

For more on the hidden costs of managing accuracy yourself, see Why You Shouldn’t DIY a Contract Repository.

Everyone promises accuracy, but few know what it means

Every contract management vendor claims to be accurate; it's the one dimension on which almost everyone competes. But what does "accuracy" actually mean?

Most solutions define accuracy narrowly as correctly capturing explicit data points, but this is only one piece of a much bigger puzzle. It ignores all the other considerations you need to account for to have genuinely usable contract intelligence.

True accuracy means comprehensive data quality. It isn’t just about capturing the right numbers and text fields — it’s about ensuring the entire dataset is structured and reliable.

What does real quality look like?

Real quality involves three essential dimensions: your repository must be trustworthy, complete, and flexible. Each pillar reinforces the others — if one is missing, the entire repository suffers.

1. Trustworthy

Trustworthiness means having full confidence in your contract data. It’s not enough for information to look correct — it must be precise, verifiable, and reliable at all times.

• Correctness: Data fields must accurately reflect what's stated within the original contract, capturing any nuances or edge cases without introducing inconsistencies.
• Auditability: Every data point should be traceable to its exact source within the contract. Without clear audit trails, even correct data could be seen as difficult to trust.

If you can’t fully trust your repository, you’ll always revert to checking the original contracts — undermining the whole purpose of having a structured database.

2. Complete

Completeness means capturing all critical information while ensuring nothing is missing.

• Capture all relevant information: Every clause, amendment, and document must be correctly modelled to reflect the contract as it actually operates.
• Verify absences: It’s not enough to record what’s there; the repository must also confirm the absence of expected terms or data fields to eliminate uncertainty.
• Filter out irrelevant information: A complete repository doesn't just capture relevant data — it actively filters out irrelevant drafts, outdated documents, and unnecessary duplicates that obscure your critical contract information.
• Document structure and organisation: Contracts aren’t standalone files; they’re networks of interlinked documents. A complete repository must explicitly model these relationships.

Without completeness, a repository ceases to be a single source of truth, forcing you to second-guess its reliability instead of trusting it.

3. Flexible

Quality isn't static. A truly accurate repository is able to evolve without compromising data quality or adding burdensome manual work.

• Tailored: Built around your specific business needs, ensuring data is captured and presented in a way that’s actually useful.
• Extensible: Adapts to new contract types or data fields effortlessly.
• Robust: Maintains accuracy across different document formats, languages, and even contracts with inconsistencies or errors.

Without flexibility, accuracy degrades as your business grows, forcing your team into continuously re-configuring the database.

Obsessing over every aspect of quality is the only path to true accuracy

Accuracy and quality are inseparable. A truly accurate repository must be trustworthy, complete, and flexible. If it fails on any of these fronts, it’s fundamentally unreliable.

• If your data isn’t trustworthy, you'll second-guess your repository, undermining the reason for having it.
• If your repository isn't complete, you'll face hidden errors from missed information or misleading data.
• If your system isn't flexible, accuracy quickly becomes outdated, leading to constant manual fixes and updates.

Vendors that define accuracy as just “capturing data” miss the bigger picture. True accuracy requires obsessing over quality at every level — from the way contracts are structured to how information is validated and maintained over time.

Nomio puts accuracy first

We take all of the responsibility for accuracy

Nomio manages every process required to keep your repository accurate — now and in the future.

With us, there are no caveats. We don’t do most of the work but then leave you to occasionally reorganise documents or manually input the odd missing data field. Accuracy is entirely our responsibility.

We do this better and more efficiently than you can

You could manage accuracy yourself — it’s not impossible. But it’s almost always costly, complex, and time-consuming.

Doing it properly requires more than just time and effort. You’d first need to build the infrastructure, design the right processes, and build a scalable quality control system — all before even getting to the actual work of maintaining accuracy.

Nomio is purpose-built for this. Our sole focus is on building and maintaining contract repositories. We operate at scale, with a dedicated contract data model, structured processes, and an expert in-house team.

That means we deliver accuracy more efficiently, more reliably, and to a standard that’s difficult for internal teams or all-in-one contract management tools to match.

We don’t just promise accuracy — we’ve defined exactly what it takes to achieve it

Taking responsibility for accuracy means nothing if accuracy is poorly defined, or the approach to achieving it lacks sophistication.

A vendor might claim to handle 100% of the accuracy workload yet still leave you with a database that’s only 70% accurate. This happens because the market doesn’t have a clear definition of quality — most solutions focus on ‘extracting data’ but fail to build the processes needed to ensure proper accuracy.

Nomio’s approach to accuracy is all-encompassing. It’s not just about extracting data — it’s about ensuring every element of your repository remains correct, organised, and contextually meaningful over time. From document organisation to ambiguity resolution, accuracy is a standard that’s built into everything we do.

Why you shouldn’t be willing to accept inaccuracy

At the start of this article, we asked: What level of inaccuracy is acceptable to you? The obvious answer is “none,” but few realise what achieving that standard truly requires. ‍

But why would you? Your job isn’t to build databases, design information architecture, or develop the processes needed to maintain contract data quality — it’s ours. We're the blacksmiths, you're the knights.

Until you’ve had to achieve accuracy at scale, it’s hard to grasp just how much is involved. The problem isn’t that businesses underestimate what accuracy entails — it’s that many solutions do too.

Your vendor shouldn't reinforce your blind spots — they should eliminate them. That’s exactly what Nomio does. We’ve designed every part of our repository service to ensure accuracy isn’t just achieved, but actively maintained without you even needing to think about it.

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