Almost every business that decides to get its contracts organised hits the same wall about a week in. The tool is chosen, the account is set up, and then someone works out there are four years of signed agreements spread across an inbox, a shared drive and a filing cabinet, and nobody has the appetite to move them. The project quietly stops there.
The problem is almost never the software. It is that the migration gets treated as one large job that has to be finished before anything works, when it is actually a small job followed by a long tail that can be worked through at leisure. This guide covers what to move first, what to leave behind, and how to get real value out of the system well before the backlog is done.
Decide what you are migrating before you move anything
The instinct is to move everything. It is the wrong instinct, and it is the main reason migrations stall. Most businesses are holding a large number of agreements that no longer need active management: expired contracts with vendors they no longer use, superseded versions of agreements that have since been renegotiated, one-off purchase terms from a supplier engaged once three years ago.
Those documents may still need to be retained for record keeping, but they do not need to be in your active repository on day one. Separate the two piles early. Your active pile is anything still in force, anything with a renewal or termination date ahead of it, and anything you would need to produce quickly if a client, an auditor or an investor asked for it.
Start with the contracts that have a date in the next 90 days
The fastest way to get value out of a new system is to load the agreements where a missed date would actually cost you something. Work out which contracts have a renewal, auto-renewal, notice or expiry date falling in the next quarter, and migrate those first.
This is usually a short list, often under twenty agreements even in a business holding several hundred. Once they are in, the system is already doing its job: it is watching the dates that matter most while you work through the rest at a sensible pace. Prioritise in roughly this order:
- Anything auto-renewing in the next 90 days
- Any agreement whose notice window opens in the next 90 days
- Your largest vendor contracts by annual spend
- Annually billed software subscriptions
- Commercial lease, insurance and finance agreements
- Everything else still in force
Capture the dates, not just the documents
A migration that only moves PDFs has not achieved much. You end up with a tidier folder and exactly the blind spot you started with. For every contract you move, the minimum useful record is the counterparty, the start date, the end or renewal date, the notice period required, the annual value, and the person inside your business who owns the relationship.
This is the part people dread, because reading each agreement and typing those fields into a form is genuinely tedious work that nobody volunteers for. It is also the part most worth automating, which is covered further down.
Agree a naming convention and stick to it
What you choose matters far less than being consistent about it. Vendor name, then document type, then year works for most businesses: Xero - Subscription Agreement - 2026. Avoid initials, internal project codes and anything that only makes sense to the person who filed it.
Agree it before the migration starts rather than halfway through. Renaming several hundred records after the fact is its own small project, and it is the kind of tidy-up that never quite gets finished.
Do not migrate your spreadsheet's mistakes
If you are moving off a tracking spreadsheet, treat its contents as a draft rather than a source of truth. Spreadsheets drift. Renewal dates get entered once and never updated after a renegotiation, vendors get renamed, whole columns get abandoned two thirds of the way down. Check each date you carry across against the agreement itself rather than trusting the cell.
It is slower, and it is the only way the new system ends up more trustworthy than the old one. If the spreadsheet is what you are escaping, it is worth understanding exactly where that approach breaks down before you carry its habits into a new tool.
How Miova makes the backlog manageable
The reason migrations stall is manual data entry, so the practical fix is to remove it. Miova lets you forward a signed PDF to your private inbox, and the key details are extracted and populated for you. That changes the unit of work from reading an agreement and filling in a form to forwarding an email, which means the backlog can be cleared in batches whenever someone has a spare twenty minutes.
Everything lands in one centralised, searchable repository, and renewal and termination reminders start running against each contract as soon as its dates are captured. A business that has been putting off a migration for a year can realistically get its active agreements in during a single afternoon, then work back through the historical pile over the following weeks without the system being any less useful in the meantime.
A realistic schedule
For a business holding a few hundred agreements, a sensible plan is one afternoon for the next-90-days list, one hour a week for the remaining active contracts, and no deadline at all for the archive. The system is fully useful from the end of the first afternoon, which is the point. A migration that delivers value on day one is a migration that gets finished.
The businesses that stall are the ones that treat the archive as a blocker. It is not. Get the live agreements in, let the reminders start running, and deal with 2021 whenever it suits you.