Small Business Contract Renewal Tracker
Two documents and four sheets that extract every signed agreement's terms, then compute the notice deadline that actually forecloses a choice.
Free download · No account needed
Contract Register
[Company], Inc. — every signed agreement, one row each
Every column pulled from the document itself. A blank cell means the document did not state it, not a guess.
| Agreement | Category | Annual Cost | Renews | Notice | Decide-By |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | — | — | — | — | — |
| — | — | — | — | — | — |
| — | — | — | — | — | — |
Decide-By is not the renewal date
| Decide-By | Renewal date minus the notice period. Past this date, the next term is already locked in |
| Renews | The date on the document. By itself, it tells you nothing about whether you still have a choice |
A renewal weeks away can already be decided. The Decide-By column is the one worth watching.
Nearly every contract tracker in this space asks you to type in what you signed: the vendor, the price, the renewal date. What gets typed is only as accurate as what someone remembers, and a lease, a fuel contract and a software subscription rarely get remembered the same way twice. Contract Register instead extracts every figure from the signed document itself, with the section it came from recorded alongside it, across the whole stack a business actually holds rather than one contract type.
Wrenfield Logistics, a fictional regional trucking company, ran nine signed agreements through the register for the first time, spanning its lease, insurance, fuel, telematics, payroll, software, financing and supply contracts. Total contracted spend came to $1,113,600 a year, a number nobody at the company had ever added up. The nine documents were signed by different people in different years and now sit in different systems, some as PDFs and one as a scanned lease nobody had reopened since signing.
Three of the nine, worth $682,800 combined, had already passed their notice deadline while their renewal dates were still weeks away, so all three had already committed to another year before anyone reopened a document. World Commerce and Contracting's own research puts the average value a business loses to exactly this kind of inattentive contract management at 8.6 percent of contract value a year. Obligation Tracker catches what renewal dates miss entirely: a certificate of insurance owed annually, a minimum volume that holds a rebate tier, a quarterly report a lender is owed.
What's in the pack
Contract Register
One row per signed agreement with cost, term type and renewal mechanism extracted straight from the document, source section included.
Renewal and Notice Calendar
Every decide-by date computed backwards from its renewal date, so a closed window shows before the renewal date itself does.
Obligation Tracker
Recurring duties buried in the documents, like a certificate of insurance or a minimum volume, tracked on their own cadence.
Spend Summary
Every agreement's true annual cost rolled into one ranked total, with the share already locked into another term called out.
Register Standard
The rule that an unsupported term gets flagged rather than estimated, and how mixed-unit costs get annualized to one figure.
Review Procedure
The monthly sweep that recomputes every decide-by date, and what escalates once a decision window closes to inside 30 days.
How to use it
- 1
Open in River, or download it
Install the pack in River so the agent reads your signed agreements directly, or take the blank Word and CSV files away and fill them in yourself.
- 2
Send every signed agreement you can find
Leases, insurance policies, vendor and supplier contracts, financing agreements, software subscriptions, NDAs, whatever format they exist in today.
- 3
Extract terms, then compute the deadline backwards
Each agreement's cost, term type and renewal mechanism gets pulled from its own text, then every decide-by date is set to the renewal date minus its notice period.
- 4
Review monthly, then act inside the window
The calendar re-sorts into locked in, urgent and open every time it runs, so a closing decision window gets a disposition before it shuts.
Frequently asked questions
Is this template free?
Yes. Two documents and four sheets download as Word and CSV files with no signup and no credit card. "Edit with AI" is a separate, optional path for founders who want the agent to build the register from their own signed agreements. The rest of the packs sit in the template library.
What format are the downloaded files?
Word documents (.docx) for the register standard and the review procedure, and CSV (.csv) for the four sheets, zipped together. They open natively in Word, Pages, Google Docs, Excel, Numbers and Sheets, with nothing to convert.
What does 'Edit with AI' actually do?
It creates a free River account and installs this exact pack as a private workspace. The agent reads whatever signed agreements you send, extracts the terms from each one, and computes every decide-by date before drafting anything back to you.
How is this different from tracking just my own outbound agreements?
The client agreement and SOW pack builds your own paper and tracks renewals only for what you send using its template. This register instead starts from every signed agreement the business holds, regardless of who drafted it or what category it falls into, and adds up what all of them cost together.
Does it tell me whether a renewal clause is enforceable?
No. It records what each document says about cost, renewal and notice, and computes the date that follows from those words. Whether a clause is enforceable in your jurisdiction is a separate question for counsel. Reviewing one contract before you sign it is a different job than tracking a whole signed stack afterward.
Who is this template for?
Any small business with a mix of signed agreements across categories, a lease, insurance, vendor contracts, financing, and no procurement team dedicated to watching any of them. A company running a dedicated procurement function has more specialized needs than this pack covers; a vendor management and renewal tracker is built for that setup instead.
Does this check whether I actually own the work these contracts cover?
No. This register tracks cost, term and renewal date for agreements you have already signed. It says nothing about whether the underlying work, a contractor's code, a designer's files, was ever actually assigned to the company. The NDA and IP assignment pack checks that instead, ranked by whether the unassigned work is still live in the product today.
Find out what you are actually committed to, and when it locks in
Download the blank pack as Word and CSV files, or open it in River and have your own signed agreements read, extracted and dated first.
Edit with AI