Why it goes wrong
Nobody decides to lose control of contracts. It happens because agreements are signed by different people, at different times, for different reasons, and are then stored wherever that person stored things. Five years later the business has perhaps sixty live agreements, no single view of them, and a genuine dependency on individual memory.
The consequences are predictable: renewals missed, notice periods passed, terms nobody agreed still binding, and negotiations conducted from a position of no leverage because the alternative to signing is chaos.
Step one: find them
The most reliable route is to work backwards from money. Take twelve months of purchase ledger data, list every supplier you paid more than a threshold amount, and for each one ask a simple question: what is the agreement behind this payment? You will find three categories: a signed contract someone can produce, a contract that certainly exists but nobody can find, and a supplier you have been paying for years with no agreement at all. All three are useful findings.
Step two: one register, eight fields
Resist the temptation to buy software first. A well-maintained spreadsheet beats an abandoned system every time. Record:
- Supplier and what the agreement covers
- Annual value, or best estimate
- Start date and end date
- Notice period, and the date notice must be given by
- Whether it renews automatically
- The named internal owner
- Where the signed document actually is
The notice date is the field that pays for the exercise. It is the moment your leverage exists, and it is almost always earlier than people expect.
Step three: get ahead of the calendar
Put every notice date in a shared calendar with a reminder three months before. Three months is roughly the minimum needed to have a genuine conversation, test an alternative, and still switch calmly if you decide to. Anything less and you are negotiating with a deadline pointed at yourself.
Step four: fix the worst terms, not all of them
Once you can see everything, triage by exposure rather than by value: agreements with uncapped liability, no exit rights, data protection obligations that were never addressed, or automatic uplifts with no cap. Fix those at the next natural renewal point. Everything else can wait for its turn. A full re-papering exercise is rarely a good use of a growing business's money.
Step five: make signing a process
Decide who can commit the business to what. A single page is usually enough: value thresholds, who approves, which standard terms apply, and where the signed copy goes. The point is not bureaucracy. It is that the register stays accurate after the person who built it moves on.
What good looks like after six months
- Any director can see, in under a minute, what is signed and when it ends.
- No agreement renews without somebody deciding it should.
- Renewal conversations start three months out, not three weeks out.
- The highest-risk terms have been addressed and the rest are on a list.
- One named person owns the register.
None of this is complicated. It is simply work that nobody currently has time to do, which is why it stays undone until it causes a problem.