How to Automate Deadlines for Renewal

Missed contract deadlines are one of the biggest sources of revenue leakage, if you don’t automate deadline renewals. For operations people, they can also be tricky to track down, because contracts tend to be stored in many different file formats and locations, without a central source of truth for deadlines.

The good news is that once you’ve moved your contracts into a contract repository, you can easily automate deadline reminders for contract renewals and other key dates. Here’s a quick walkthrough of why and how to set up automated deadline renewals, so you never miss a deadline again.

Why automate contract deadline reminders?

Maybe this sounds familiar: Contracts are silently auto-renewing without anyone realizing. Agreements authorized by former employees are tucked away and overlooked, leading to unforeseen recurring expenses. These expenses frequently surprise those responsible for paying them, as current team members are unaware of these existing contracts.

Unintended renewals are one of the largest avoidable expenses for growing organizations. With a contract management approach, you can automate deadline alerts and stay ahead of renewals — like Sevita, who implemented deadline reminders org-wide, and reaped the benefits of “Many hours saved, many dollars saved in contracts that we meant to terminate and forgot.”

How to automate contract deadlines for renewal

Concord automatically keeps a list of all deadlines you enter when you import your contracts. This is much easier than tracking deadlines manually in Excel, because Concord can send you weekly summary emails of deadlines in the near future

Here’s how to turn on automated contract deadline reminders.

1. Under ⚙ Settings, click Notifications in the left-hand panel. 
2. Look for the Deadline reminders section.
3. Click the toggle under Receive weekly deadline reminders by email. 
4. Specify how many days in advance you’d like to receive automated reminders.

Concord’s automated deadline alerts help you manage many types of contract deadlines, including start-to-finish timelines, notices, financial obligations, and deadlines related to relevant contract clauses.

How to add deadline and renewal dates to automated reminders

The accuracy of your deadline reminders depends on the precision of your data. That’s why it’s important to add deadlines and renewal dates in the lifecycle details when you create or import new contracts.

The following info is especially crucial for accurate deadline automation:

1. “Signed on” date
2. Contract duration
3. “Effective on” date
4. Renewal details
5. Notification of non-renewal terms

As long as you’re consistent about entering these details, you’ll be able to automate deadline reminders for hundreds or even thousands of agreements.

How to extract deadline and renewal data to an Excel spreadsheet

Once you’ve collected contract deadline data in Concord, another option is to extract contract conditions as an Excel file, so you can perform more detailed analysis of deadline dates in Microsoft Office, or in an enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM) tool of your choice.

Here’s how to extract deadline and renewal data as an Excel spreadsheet.

1. Navigate to Concord’s Deadlines page.
2. Optionally, apply filters, then click Export.
3. Select Export list from the toolbar above the documents.
4. The Export choice modal will open.
5. Choose to export the Deadline report data as an Excel file.
6. Select Export.

How to sort contracts by deadlines and renewal dates

Yet another option in Concord is to view a list of all contracts with upcoming deadlines, and filter them by upcoming renewal dates for easier automation.

Here’s how to sort contracts by deadlines and renewal dates.

On the Deadlines tab, you’ll see all contracts with upcoming deadlines, such as renewals. You can filter this view by applying Filters, which will bring up documents based on their renewal dates and other deadlines, as follows: 

• All: All deadlines 
• Upcoming: Deadlines in the future
• Past: Deadlines that have already occurred
• Unknown: Deadline information is unknown

Another possibility is to filter agreements by the types of deadlines they have:

• Lifecycle: Lifecycle dates, such as an end date or renewal date
• Financial conditions: Financial conditions of clauses 
• Main clause: Date-based conditions of clause

While it’s possible to set up manual deadline reminders in Outlook or Google Calendar, you’ll find yourself repeatedly having to set up reminders for every new contract. Contract management software automates this repetitive task, helping you view and filter numerous contracts by their upcoming renewal deadlines with ease.

Automate your contract renewal deadlines, with Concord.