Renewals and notice
Who gets notified when a contract is about to renew?
Ask around your organization who gets told when a contract is coming up. If the answer is one person's calendar, or nobody, that's the gap to fix first.
A good reminder reaches the right person early enough to do something about it, and still works when that person is on leave or has moved on.
Set up a reminder ladder
One reminder isn't enough, and ten is too many. A short ladder of checkpoints works better, each with its own job.
60 days before the notice deadline, the owner decides whether to keep, shop or renegotiate. At 30 days, quotes are in and a notice letter is drafted if you're leaving. At 7 days, notice goes out if that's the decision. At 1 day, it's the last call for anything that slipped.
Renewals and expirations deserve their own checkpoints too, so finance sees the renewal coming and nobody is surprised by an end date.
A worked example
Say an answering service contract renews January 1, 2027 with 60 days' notice. The last day to give notice is November 2, 2026.
With checkpoints at 60, 30, 7 and 1 day, reminders land on September 3, October 3, October 26 and November 1. The contracts admin gets each one, and the owner, the operations lead who knows how the service has really been, is copied.
Early September is late enough to have this year's service fresh in mind and early enough to call two other answering services.
What usually goes wrong
The reminder is set on the end date instead of the notice date, so it arrives after the decision has been made for you.
It lives in one person's calendar. When they leave or go on leave, the reminder goes with them.
There are so many alerts that people stop reading them. A reminder that fires every day for a month teaches everyone to ignore it.
The only reminder comes from the vendor, timed to suit them, not you.
What to watch
Do you get notifications at all?
Many organizations only find out about a renewal when the invoice shows up.
Who is notified?
It should be a shared inbox or a role, not only one person. People leave, and their reminders can leave with them.
Is the person who manages the vendor told too?
Your contracts admin knows the date. The department lead knows whether the vendor is any good.
How early does the first reminder come?
A reminder a week out gives you time to send notice, not time to shop around or negotiate.
What happens when the owner is out?
Someone else should still see the reminder, or it waits until they're back and the window has closed.
Is anyone outside your organization copied?
A reminder that your vendor can see tells them you're thinking about leaving.
How Sapphires helps
- One daily email per business, sent only on days something is due, and never the same reminder twice.
- You choose the checkpoints: 60, 30, 7 or 1 day before a notice deadline, and 60, 30, 7 days or the day of a renewal or expiration.
- Contract owners can be copied on reminders for their own contracts.
- Sapphires never emails the vendor.
- Notice deadlines, renewals and end dates also sit on one calendar.