Why do university contracts renew by surprise?
Because contracts, suppliers and renewals live in inboxes, shared drives and individual memory, spread across departments. No single place knows what the institution has agreed to or when it's due. Picture a three-year software license signed by a dean who has since moved on: the renewal clause triggers quietly, finance sees the invoice a month later, and the chance to renegotiate is already gone. The date arrives before anyone acts on it, and the university pays for another year it never chose.
What does a contract and renewal workflow include?
Reminders before a deadline, an approval path defined in advance, and one record of what's signed, with whom and until when. A simple reminder schedule:
- 90 days out: the owner is notified to review and decide to renew, renegotiate or end.
- 60 days out: budget and legal review, if the value or terms need it.
- 30 days out: final approval and signature, or formal notice to end.
And the approval path, defined once:
- The request or renewal is logged against the contract record.
- It routes to the budget owner, then to legal if the value or terms require it.
- Approved items go to signature, and the signed copy returns to the record.
- The next renewal date is set automatically.
Underneath the reminders and approvals sits one record of every agreement: who signed it, what it's worth, when it renews and what notice it needs to end. That record is what lets anyone with the right access answer "what have we committed to" in seconds instead of searching inboxes, and it's what turns a budget season from a scramble into something a university can plan around.
Who should see contract data?
Only the right people. Because this data is sensitive, it runs on enterprise-grade permissions: finance sees finance, legal sees legal, and a department sees its own agreements, without a shared drive open to everyone. A faculty member who starts a purchase can see their own request move through approval, but not another department's vendor terms. Where procurement touches the ERP, RunMyProcess integrates with SAP in both directions, so the contract record and the finance system agree.
The same approach extends to new purchases as well. A department that needs a piece of equipment starts a request, it routes through the budget owner and, above a set amount, through procurement, and the approved order lands with a record of who signed off. The six-week purchase that stalled on an unknown signature becomes a tracked request anyone can locate, with the next step always clear.
Where do you start?
With the contracts most likely to lapse or auto-renew in the next quarter. Put those on reminders first, then bring the rest into one record over time. Pull your five largest agreements due this year, set a 90-day reminder on each, and you've removed the most expensive surprises in an afternoon. Send us your renewal headaches and we'll map a reminder and approval flow around them.
Keep reading: Workflow automation in higher education · IT service management for higher education
