What's the difference between reviewing contract deviations and validating contract terms?

Depending on the business needs, you may change the terms of a contract. In such cases, generate a Contract Deviations report to see all the changes made to a contract and deviations taken from the company policies.

To generate the report use the Review Contract Deviations or the View Contract Deviations actions. You can take a copy of this report with your comments added along with the approval notification and submit them to the next level approvers.

When you submit a contract for approval, the application gives a list of errors and warnings. This one is called as Contract Terms Validation. While fixing warnings is optional, you must fix the errors reported after contract validation. To see any errors or warnings in contract, you don't have to wait till it's ready to be submitted for approval. You can use the Validate Contract Terms action to review the errors before hand.

Contract deviations and validations do overlap. For example, the Contract Deviations report shows invalid clauses that can cause errors when you validate the contract. Examples of invalid clauses include clauses that were placed on hold or have expired. But the validation checks are more detailed and include checks such as errors in variable definitions. Take a look at the table here, that compares contract deviation and contract terms validation:

Feature	Contract Deviation Report	Contract Terms Validation
Lists changes made to the contract terms applied from a template	Yes, lists all changes including the addition of clauses or substitution of alternate clauses.	Restricted to warnings for some changes such as the deletion of mandatory clauses.
Lists changes to clauses recommended by the Contract Expert feature	Yes	Yes
Includes a list of deviations from company policies	Yes	No
Lists invalid clauses that will prevent the contract from being submitted for approval	Yes	Yes
Lists variable and other errors that will prevent the contract from being submitted for approval	No	Yes
Can be attached as a PDF report to the approval notification	Yes	No
Makes it possible to add comments for approvers	Yes	No
Makes it possible to add approval rules for additional approval routing	Yes	No