Contract vendor management is the same discipline as vendor and contract management with the words reversed, and the practical question underneath both is where the contract should live. The answer that works is that the file can live anywhere and the dates have to live on the vendor, because the vendor is what somebody opens when the question is asked.
The vendor is the thing people look up
Nobody searches for a contract by its filename. They search for the supplier, because the question always arrives in the form 'what is the situation with this company'. A contract stored by document rather than against the counterparty is findable only by the person who filed it, which is the same failure as the spreadsheet nobody else understands.
Three dates out, PDF stays where it is
Start, renewal and notice, extracted at filing and put on the vendor record. The document itself can stay in whatever shared drive it already lives in. This is a deliberately small change and it captures nearly all of the value that a contract management implementation would have delivered for a small business.
One record answers both questions
Is this supplier approved and current, and what did we sign with them. Split across two systems those questions produce two partial answers and an argument about which is right. On one record they are the same page, which is the entire argument for managing contracts as an attribute of the vendor rather than as their own domain.
Questions people ask about contract vendor management
Should contracts live in a document system or on the vendor record?
The file can live in a document system. The dates belong on the vendor record, because that is what somebody opens when the question is asked and a date nobody sees does no work.
Do we need dedicated contract management software?
For redlining, negotiation workflow and e-signature at volume, yes. For knowing what you signed and when it renews, the vendor record covers it and is one fewer system to keep current.
What if a supplier has several contracts?
Several rows against one vendor, each with its own renewal and notice dates. The supplier is the counterparty; the contracts are things that hang off it, and that shape holds however many there are.