Never miss an auto-renewal again

Auto-renewal clauses are not hidden. They are in the contract you signed, in plain language, in a document you have not opened since the day you signed it. They cost you money for a purely mechanical reason: the notice window opens and closes while nobody is looking at the file.

Get the contracts into Documents

Upload them. All of them, including the ones you are fairly sure are dormant, because dormant is where auto-renewals live.

Once they are indexed you can ask across the whole set, which is the thing you cannot do with a folder of PDFs on a drive.

Ask what you are actually committed to

Start with a single question, before automating anything.

Look across all our vendor contracts and tell me, for each one:

  does it auto-renew, and on what date
  how much notice we have to give to stop it
  therefore, what is the last day we could act
  what it costs

Sort by that last day, soonest first. If a contract does not say, tell me
that rather than assuming it does not renew.

The first time most people run this they find one thing they had forgotten entirely and one where the notice window has already closed for this year.

"Tell me rather than assuming" is doing real work. Silence in a contract is not the same as a clause saying it will not renew, and an answer that quietly treats the two as equivalent is exactly the kind that gets trusted and then costs a year's subscription. Make it say when it does not know.

Put a task before every window, not on the date

The renewal date is the wrong date to be told about. You need the last day you could act, minus enough time to actually decide.

For every contract that auto-renews, create a task two weeks before the
last day we could give notice.

Title it with the vendor, what it costs, and the real deadline. In the
description, quote the notice clause and link the document.

Assign it to me.

Two weeks is not arbitrary: it is long enough to have the internal conversation about whether you still want the thing, which is the actual decision.

Re-run it when contracts change

Once a quarter is enough, and it is a scheduled job rather than a habit:

Every quarter, re-read our vendor contracts and check the renewal tasks
still match. If a contract has been replaced or its terms changed, flag it.

What good looks like

You are never surprised by a renewal again, and you have a list of what you are committed to, sorted by when you would have to act.

The first run pays for itself. The quarterly one is what stops the list going stale as contracts get replaced.