Ask most SMEs who owns contract management and you get a pause, then a qualified answer. Finance handles the invoices. Operations signed most of the supplier agreements. The founder did the big ones personally and still holds them in a personal inbox. Legal is an external firm engaged when something goes wrong.
Nobody is wrong in that answer, which is the problem. Contract management lands in the gap between functions, and gaps do not send reminders.
Why it ends up nobody's job
Contracts get signed by whoever negotiated them, which means ownership is distributed by accident rather than design. The operations lead signs the logistics agreement, the marketing manager signs the agency retainer, the founder signs the lease. Each of them is the person who knows that contract best, and each of them reasonably assumes someone else is keeping a central list.
The work itself is also unglamorous and invisible when done well. Nobody is thanked for a renewal that was reviewed on time. The only visible outcomes are failures, which means the job attracts no volunteers and gets delegated downward until it stops being anyone's explicitly.
Separate two things that get confused
Ownership of a contract and ownership of the contract process are different jobs, and conflating them is why the question feels hard.
The contract owner is the person who holds the commercial relationship: they know whether the vendor is performing, whether the business still needs the service, and whether the terms should change at renewal. That should stay distributed, because it needs to sit with whoever actually uses the service.
The process owner is the person accountable for every agreement being captured, every key date being tracked, and the right owner being prompted in time to make a decision. That should be one named person, and it is the role most SMEs have never explicitly assigned.
How the process owner changes as you grow
The right answer is not the same at fifteen people as it is at a hundred and fifty. A rough progression that holds for most growing businesses:
- Under 20 people: the founder or a co-founder, in practice, with a documented list so it survives them being unavailable
- 20 to 50: the operations lead or office manager, as part of a broader admin remit
- 50 to 100: finance, because by this point contracts are mostly a spend and forecasting question
- 100 and above: a procurement or commercial function, often with a part-time legal resource attached
The common failure is leaving it with the founder well past the point where they have the attention for it. The second most common is assuming a handover happened because the job was mentioned once in a role description.
Why finance is usually the right home earlier than people expect
Most SMEs default to operations, because contracts feel operational. In practice, finance is often the better home sooner than expected. Every contract is a committed cost with a date attached, which is the same shape as everything else finance already tracks. Finance is also the function most likely to notice an unexpected charge, which is frequently how a missed renewal gets discovered in the first place.
The argument against is that finance does not own the vendor relationships, but that is precisely why the split above matters. Finance owning the process does not mean finance deciding whether to renew. It means finance making sure someone decides.
Make ownership survive the person
Whoever takes it, the handover test is simple: if that person left tomorrow, would their successor be able to produce a complete list of active agreements and upcoming dates on their first day?
If the answer depends on searching an inbox, ownership is attached to a person rather than to a system, and it will not survive a departure or an extended absence. Writing it down helps, and a short contract management policy is worth the hour it takes.
How Miova makes ownership stick
A named owner still needs somewhere for the accountability to live. In Miova, every contract carries an assigned internal owner alongside its dates and value, so the distinction between who holds the relationship and who runs the process is built into the record rather than held in someone's head.
Renewal and termination reminders go out ahead of each window, which means the process owner is not relying on memory and the contract owner gets prompted in time to make an actual decision. Role-based access keeps sensitive agreements visible only to the people who should see them, and because everything sits in one centralised repository, a handover is a matter of changing who receives the reminders rather than reconstructing a list from scratch.
The short version
Distribute contract ownership, centralise process ownership, name the process owner out loud, and make sure the list they are accountable for lives somewhere other than their inbox. Most businesses get the first part right by accident and never do the other three.