If your business already pays for Microsoft 365, SharePoint costs nothing extra, your team already has accounts, and IT already knows how to administer it. That makes it the default home for signed contracts in a lot of New Zealand SMEs, and for a while it works perfectly well.
The question is not whether SharePoint can store contracts. It obviously can. The question is what happens as volume grows and the business starts needing answers the document library was never designed to give.
What SharePoint genuinely does well
- Secure storage with permissions that map to the structure your business already uses
- Full text search across the content of documents, including scanned PDFs once they have been processed
- Version history, so a variation does not overwrite the agreement it amends
- Integration with the tools your team already works in every day
For a business with a modest number of agreements and one organised person maintaining them, that combination is hard to argue with. The trouble starts when the business needs the contracts to tell it something rather than simply hold them.
Where it stops being enough
| What you need | SharePoint | Purpose-built contract management |
|---|---|---|
| Store signed PDFs securely | Yes | Yes |
| Search across document text | Yes | Yes |
| Know which contracts renew next quarter | Only if someone maintains a metadata column by hand | Built in, from dates captured on upload |
| Be warned before a notice period closes | Needs a custom Power Automate flow, built and maintained | Automatic on every contract |
| Capture contract details without manual entry | Manual, every time | Extracted when the document arrives |
| Know who owns each agreement | A column someone remembers to fill in | A field the system tracks and reports on |
| See total committed spend across vendors | Export and rebuild in a spreadsheet | Available on the dashboard |
The metadata problem
Everything useful you can do with contracts in SharePoint depends on library columns: renewal date, notice period, owner, annual value. Those columns are only as good as the discipline behind them, and they are filled in by hand by whoever uploads the file.
In practice the first fifty contracts get complete metadata and the next fifty do not. Someone uploads a signed PDF in a hurry, leaves the renewal date blank, and intends to come back to it. The column is now unreliable, which means the view built on top of it is unreliable, which means nobody trusts the renewal report and everyone goes back to checking the contracts individually. The system has not broken. It has quietly stopped being used.
The Power Automate answer, and its limits
You can build reminders on top of a SharePoint library with Power Automate, and plenty of businesses have. A flow watches the renewal date column and emails the owner 60 days out. It works, and if your business has someone who enjoys building it, it is a reasonable answer.
The limits show up later. The flow depends on the same hand-entered dates, so it inherits the metadata problem rather than solving it. It needs someone to own it when a column is renamed or a licence changes. And it usually exists in one person's head, which makes it fragile in exactly the way a renewal reminder should not be. A reminder system that fails silently is worse than none, because the business has stopped checking manually on the assumption that it is covered.
When SharePoint is genuinely the right call
If you have a small number of agreements, low turnover in who manages them, and no contracts where a missed notice period would cost real money, SharePoint is fine and switching would be a waste of effort. It is also the right answer if your contracts need to sit alongside a much larger set of documents with the same permissions, or if your IT policy is genuinely restrictive about where business records can live.
The switch is worth making when the business can no longer answer a simple question quickly. What renews in the next 90 days, what is it costing, and who decided to keep it.
How Miova compares
Miova is not trying to replace SharePoint as a document store for your business. It exists to do the part SharePoint leaves to human discipline: capturing contract details without manual entry, tracking renewal and termination dates against each agreement, and telling the right person before a notice window closes rather than after. Forward a signed PDF to your private Miova inbox and the details are populated for you, which is the step that the metadata column never survives.
Final thoughts
SharePoint is a capable document library and a poor renewal tracker, and those are different jobs. If your contract process currently depends on somebody filling in a date column correctly every single time, the honest question is not whether SharePoint can do the job. It is whether it has been doing it, and how you would know if it had stopped.