Contract management — what happens after signature
The most expensive stage of a contract begins after it is signed: dates, automatic renewal, obligations and acts. Why it is exactly this part that gets lost.
Signing is not the end
The cycle people picture is: prepare, agree, sign, file. The real cycle carries on after signature, and that is where the money is — payment dates, delivery milestones, automatic renewal dates, notice periods for termination.
A contract that goes into a folder after signature is a contract no longer under control. It is remembered only once the problem has already happened.
The three most expensive things to miss
In practice most of the losses come from three cases:
- Automatic renewal — the contract renewed itself for another year because the notice period slipped by.
- The act that was never drawn up — the work was done, but no act was signed and no invoice could be issued.
- The indexation nobody applied — the price review the contract provided for did not happen in time.
What systematic control means
The answer is not "pay more attention". The answer is that a deadline stops living in somebody’s memory and becomes a date written into a system, with an owner and a reminder set in advance.
Obligations work the same way: the delivery milestones are written out separately, each has an owner, an act is created directly from them, and an invoice from the act. All three stay in one chronology, and the question "what has been done on this contract" is answered on one screen.