How to run a contract renewal audit in one afternoon

You almost certainly do not know how many of your contracts will renew this year without anybody deciding anything.

Not because you are disorganised. Because the information is spread across a signed PDF in a Drive folder, an email thread from eighteen months ago, and an invoice that arrives so reliably nobody reads the line item any more. The contracts are all fine individually. It is the set nobody has looked at.

A renewal audit fixes that. It is one afternoon of unglamorous work, it needs no software, and at the end of it you have a single list of every agreement you are party to, when each one ends, and which ones are about to renew whether you like it or not.

This is written for whoever signs the contracts. If that is you, block out three hours.

What you are actually looking for

Two kinds of contract, and most people only think about one of them.

Money coming in. Client retainers, project agreements, service contracts. When one of these ends quietly, you lose revenue and usually find out from the accounts spreadsheet a month later.

Money going out. Software subscriptions, the office lease, insurance, the accountant, the contractor who has been on a rolling agreement since last spring. When one of these renews quietly, you pay for another year of something you may not want.

Both are contracts with end dates. Auditing one and not the other is how an agency ends up chasing a client renewal on the same week it discovers it just paid for twelve more months of a tool nobody uses.

Step one: get everything in one place

Give yourself a folder and fill it. The sources, in the order they usually pay off:

1. The signed agreements you already have. Drive, Dropbox, email attachments, the folder on somebody's laptop.
2. Your accounting software. Every recurring supplier payment is a contract, whether or not anybody signed a document. Export twelve months of transactions and look at what repeats.
3. The company card statement. This is where the subscriptions nobody remembers live.
4. Your own invoices out. Every client you bill on a repeating basis has an agreement behind it, even if that agreement is now three amendments old.

Do not read anything yet. Just collect. Reading while collecting is how three hours becomes three days.

Step two: one row per contract

Open a spreadsheet. These columns, in this order, because it is the order you will fill them in:

Column	Why it is there
What it is	"Acme retainer", "Adobe CC", "office lease"
Direction	In or out. You will sort on this
Counterparty	Who the other side is
Value	Per month or per year, pick one and stick to it
Start date	Often the only date you can find quickly
End date	The date the term runs to
Auto renews?	Yes, no, or unknown
Notice period	In days. Blank if there is none
Notice deadline	End date minus notice period
Where the document is	A link, so you never hunt for it twice
Decision	Renew, renegotiate, leave, or undecided

Eleven columns is more than a list of dates and less than a database. It is the smallest thing that answers the question you are asking.

Fill in what you can from memory and the folder. Leave gaps. Gaps are findings.

Step three: read for two clauses only

Now open the documents, and resist reading them properly. You are looking for two things.

The renewal clause. Search the text for "renew". You are looking for wording like "shall automatically renew for successive periods of twelve months" or "continues until terminated". If it renews on its own, write yes in the auto renews column and record the length of the new term. A twelve month auto renewal is a very different problem from a monthly one.

The notice clause. Search for "notice" and "terminate". You want the number of days, who has to give it, and how. Three details that catch people out, every time:

• The periods are often different for each side. Your supplier may need 30 days and you may need 90. Read both.
• The clock usually runs from notice received, not sent. An email at 5pm on the deadline may not count.
• Notice frequently has to go to a named address in a schedule, not to the person you actually deal with.

Write the notice period in days. Then calculate the notice deadline and put it in the column. That date, not the end date, is the last day you can still make a decision. If you would rather not do the arithmetic by hand, our notice period calculator does it from the end date and the notice length.

If a document has no renewal clause at all, that is a finding too. It means the contract simply ends, which is its own kind of risk on the money-in side.

Step four: sort, and see what you have

Sort by notice deadline, ascending. Now look at the top of the list.

Everything with a notice deadline in the next 90 days is a decision you are making in the next three months whether you engage with it or not. That is the real output of the audit: not a tidy spreadsheet, but a short list of decisions with dates attached.

Three groups usually fall out, and each has a different response:

Already past the notice deadline. The contract will renew, and there is nothing to be done about this term. Note the next deadline and move on. Do not spend the afternoon being annoyed about it.

Deadline inside 90 days. Act now. For money-in contracts, this is when you open the renewal conversation from a position of preparation rather than urgency. For money-out, this is the window to renegotiate or cancel.

Deadline further out. Fine. It goes on the list and the only thing that matters is that somebody is reminded before the window closes.

Step five: write a decision next to every row

This is the step people skip, and skipping it wastes the whole afternoon.

A tracked deadline with no decision attached is a better organised surprise. For every row, write one of four words: renew, renegotiate, leave, undecided. Undecided is a legitimate answer as long as it comes with a date by which it stops being undecided.

For the money-in contracts, put the renewal conversation in the calendar now, at least a month before the notice deadline. For the money-out ones, decide who is responsible for actually cancelling, because "we agreed to drop it" is not the same as somebody having sent the notice.

What you will probably find

Every audit turns up roughly the same things, and it is oddly reassuring to know that in advance:

• Two or three subscriptions nobody has used in months, each renewing annually.
• At least one client agreement whose end date nobody can establish, because the original was amended by email.
• A contract that already renewed silently, some time ago.
• One agreement where the notice period is long enough that the window closes before you would naturally start thinking about it.

None of these are signs of a badly run business. They are what happens to any set of contracts that nobody looks at as a set.

The honest bit about doing this in a spreadsheet

The audit works in a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is genuinely fine for the afternoon you spend building it.

Where it stops working is the day after. A spreadsheet holds dates, it does not watch them. Nothing in it will contact you when a notice window opens. The notice deadline column goes stale the first time a contract is extended and nobody recalculates. And the whole thing depends on one person remembering to open it, which works right up until that person is on holiday, busy, or gone.

The usual patch is calendar reminders, and they fail differently. A reminder fires, you are mid-something, you dismiss it, and no state anywhere records that a decision was never made.

So the honest test is this. If you have fewer than about ten contracts, and you genuinely do a monthly review, a spreadsheet and a disciplined habit will hold. Above that, or if the review depends on one person, the arithmetic stops being the hard part and remembering does.

That is the point where tracking software earns its money, and not before. What it changes is that the notice deadline becomes a field on the contract rather than a mental note, the alert arrives before the window closes rather than on the day it shuts, and it arrives where you already are: email, Slack, Teams, or your phone.

Expiro does that job. You enter the end date and the notice period, and it alerts you at 90, 60, 30 and 7 days before expiry, and before the notice window closes. It costs from $19 a month on pricing, with a 14 day trial and no card, and the first useful thing to do with it is to type in the list you just built.

Do the audit either way

If you take one thing from this: the audit is worth doing this week even if you never buy anything.

The value is not the spreadsheet. It is finding out how many of your agreements were going to renew without a decision, and getting to make those decisions on purpose. Agencies and consultants feel it most sharply, because the contracts run in both directions at once, but anybody who has signed more than a handful of agreements has a list like this and has never seen it.

Three hours. A spreadsheet. Eleven columns. Then you know.