Contracts that renew themselves: find them before 1 January

Every December, part of next year's spending is already decided, without anyone deciding it. These are the auto-renewing contracts: miss the notice window and you pay for another year.

The sentence on page 7

Almost every service contract has a clause like this one: "This agreement renews automatically for a further 12 months unless either party gives at least 60 days' written notice before expiry."

The clause is reasonable. It protects both sides from a sudden stop. The trouble starts after signature. The contract goes into a folder or an inbox, and the notice deadline goes nowhere. It isn't in anyone's calendar and has no owner. You find out about it when next year's invoice arrives.

Why it happens in well-run companies

Missing a notice period isn't carelessness. It comes from three things you'll find almost everywhere:

1. Contracts are scattered. Some sit with procurement, some with legal, some in the inbox of the director who negotiated them.
2. The date that matters isn't the expiry date. Everyone knows a contract "runs until year end". Few know the decision was actually due on 1 November.
3. It's nobody's job in particular. Procurement thinks legal has it, legal thinks the user of the service has it, and the user thinks procurement has it.

What you can do this week, without any software

You can build the list in two hours with a simple spreadsheet:

1. Collect the recurring contracts: maintenance, leases, software subscriptions, security, cleaning, telecoms, consulting, operating leases.
2. For each one, note four things: the expiry date, whether it auto-renews, the notice period in days, and the last day to send notice (expiry minus notice period).
3. Sort by that last day, not by expiry.
4. Put a name next to each one: who decides whether it continues.
5. Ask the simple question: "Would we sign this today, at this price?" Where the answer is "no" or "not at this price", the notice period becomes renegotiation leverage, not just an exit.

The hard part isn't the list. It's keeping it current. A spreadsheet looks fine in month one. By month six, nobody knows whether it's complete.

What it looks like when the register keeps itself

In BP Contracts, the notice period is a field on the contract, not a row in a separate spreadsheet. When you upload the contract, the notice period can be read straight from the clause instead of typed in. Thirty days before the deadline, Termi, the colleague who never forgets a deadline, reminds the person responsible. If nobody responds, Termi keeps asking and tells the next person up. The CFO sees one list: what expires, what renews, what has been decided and what is still waiting.

Three questions for this month

• Which contracts expire or auto-renew before 31 March?
• Which ones have a notice period, and when is the deadline?
• Which would we still sign today, at this price?