Most businesses that decide to get on top of their contracts start in the same place. A spreadsheet, a column for the supplier, a column for the renewal date, and good intentions. Six weeks later there are forty rows, a third of them half filled, and nobody can tell whether an empty cell means there is nothing to record or that nobody has looked yet.
The problem is rarely effort. It is that nobody agreed the fields before the first row went in. A register where every contract carries the same information is something you can act on. A register where the fields depend on who typed them is a list of documents you still have to open.
This is the minimum set worth capturing for every agreement, and the reasoning behind each one. Ten fields, not forty. A register that asks for too much gets abandoned faster than one that asks for too little.
The fields that identify the contract
Four fields do the identifying work, and they are the ones most likely to be filled in correctly because they are obvious from the first page of the document.
- Counterparty, spelled consistently. One supplier entered three different ways is three suppliers as far as your register is concerned, and consolidation opportunities hide in that gap
- What the agreement actually covers, in a short plain phrase rather than the document's own title. 'Warehouse cleaning, Penrose site' tells you more than 'Services Agreement 2024'
- Contract type, from a short fixed list you decide up front. Supplier, software, lease, insurance, employment, customer. Five or six categories is enough
- Internal owner, named. Not a department. The single most useful field in any register is the name of the person who should be answering questions about that agreement
The owner field is the one people skip and the one that decides whether the register gets used at all. A contract with a department against it has nobody watching it. Our guide to who should own contract management covers how to assign ownership without creating a bottleneck.
The date fields are where most registers fail
A renewal date on its own is close to useless, and this is the most common gap by a wide margin. If the agreement renews on 1 March and requires ninety days notice to stop it, the date that matters to you is 1 December. A register that records only the renewal date tells you about a decision three months after you lost the ability to make it.
- Start date, and end date or renewal date
- Notice period, as a number of days
- The notice deadline itself, calculated from those two and stored as its own date
- Whether the agreement renews automatically, as a plain yes or no
- Review date, set earlier than the notice deadline, for the conversation about whether you still want the thing
Keeping the notice deadline as a separate date rather than something to work out later is the difference between a register that warns you and one that reports on what already happened. Auto-renewal deserves its own column because it changes what inaction means. On a contract that renews automatically, doing nothing is a decision to keep paying. We cover the mechanics in auto-renewal clauses explained.
Money, and why one number is not enough
Most registers record a single value, usually whatever appears on the front of the contract. That number ages badly and invites comparisons that do not hold.
Record the committed value and the billing frequency separately, so a $2,400 annual licence and a $2,400 monthly service are not sitting in the same column looking identical. Add the price review or escalation terms where the agreement has them, because a contract with CPI-linked annual increases is not the contract you signed three years ago. If the agreement caps those increases, the cap is worth a column of its own come renewal time.
Where the document actually lives
The last field is the least interesting and the most frequently needed. A link or location for the signed copy, plus any variations and side letters that came after it.
Variations are the quiet problem here. The original agreement is usually easy enough to find. The email that extended it by twelve months, or the amendment that moved the notice period from thirty days to ninety, tends to live in somebody's inbox. A register that points at the original and misses the variation is confidently wrong, which is worse than being empty.
Where Miova fits
Every field above can be kept in a spreadsheet, and for a business with fifteen agreements a spreadsheet is a reasonable answer. What breaks first is not the storage. It is the data entry and the watching.
Miova is built around that gap. Contracts arrive by forwarding the agreement to an email address, and the counterparty, dates, notice period and values are extracted rather than typed, which is the step where registers usually go stale. The notice deadline is calculated from the renewal date and the notice period instead of being left as mental arithmetic, and alerts fire against that deadline. Owners are assigned per contract, so the reminder reaches the person who can act on it rather than landing in a shared inbox.
What to leave out
Resist the urge to add fields because they might be useful one day. Clause-level detail, full payment histories, supplier performance notes and risk ratings all sound sensible, and all push the register towards being a second system that nobody maintains.
If a field would not change a decision or prompt an action, it does not belong in the register. It belongs in the document, which is one click away.
The short version
Ten fields: counterparty, what it covers, type, owner, start, end or renewal, notice period, notice deadline, auto-renewal yes or no, and value with billing frequency. Plus a link to the signed copy and its variations. Agree them before the first row goes in, store the notice deadline as its own date, and make sure every contract has a human name against it. A register with those fields complete is worth more than a system with forty fields half filled.