Nobody in the business can tell me how many contracts we have, or what renews next month.
Your entire contract estate in one register, with every renewal, break and review date tracked and a named owner against each. Then somebody whose job it is to act before the window closes. The reason this is a service rather than a piece of software is that the failure is almost never a lack of information. It is that nobody was accountable for acting on it. A contract auto-renews for three years because the notice window opened while the person who knew about it was between jobs. A break clause passes because exercising it required a decision nobody wanted to own. A rent review goes undiaried and arrives as a proposal with a short deadline attached. In each case the date was knowable. What was missing was a person whose job it was. A dashboard tells you a deadline is coming. It does not write the letter, and it does not care whether anybody reads it.
Dinmore Bell holds a client’s entire contract estate in one register: every counterparty, value, renewal, break and review date, with a named owner against each and somebody accountable for acting before the window closes. Agreements are abstracted once into structured data rather than re-read each time a question arrives.
How we own it
Build the register
Every agreement located, read and abstracted: counterparty, value, term, notice period, renewal mechanics, assignment and change-of-control. Locating comes first and is usually the longest part. Contracts live in a shared drive, in three inboxes, in a filing cabinet at a site nobody visits, and in the personal folders of somebody who left. We go and find them, and we record what we could not find, because a known gap is manageable and an unknown one is not. Then each agreement is read once, properly, by somebody whose job is to read it, and reduced to structured data. Not a scan in a folder: fields. Who the counterparty actually is, including whether the entity that signed still exists. What it is worth, and whether that figure is fixed, indexed or uncapped. When it started and how it ends. How much notice, in what form, delivered where, and to whom. Whether it renews automatically and for how long. Whether you can assign it, and what happens on a change of control, which is the clause that decides how much of your contract estate survives a sale. That last point is worth stating plainly. A business being sold is frequently discovered to have a third of its revenue sitting under contracts that a buyer cannot inherit without consent. Knowing that a year out is a negotiating position. Discovering it in diligence is a discount.
Watch the dates
Flags fire before the window opens, not after it closes. Weekly digest, board-ready monthly summary, real-time alerts on anything material. The timing of the flag is the whole design. An alert on the day a notice period opens is too late, because deciding whether to exercise a break, renegotiate a renewal or let something lapse is a commercial decision that needs the operational people, sometimes a quote from an alternative supplier, and occasionally a board discussion. So the first flag lands well before the window, sized to how long the decision realistically takes rather than to how long the contract says you have. What goes out is deliberately layered, because a single undifferentiated alert list is ignored within a month. The weekly digest is short and operational: what is coming, what needs a decision, what is waiting on somebody. The monthly summary is written to be put in front of a board: total contracted value, what is renewing this quarter, what the exposure looks like, what changed. Anything genuinely material, an unexpected termination notice, a change-of-control trigger, a price escalation clause about to bite, is raised immediately rather than held for the cycle. And every item carries a named owner. Not a department. A person, who has been told, and who is asked again if nothing has happened.
Act on them
We draft the notice, open the renegotiation and take the meeting. A dashboard tells you a deadline is coming; it does not write the letter. This is the part that distinguishes the service from every contract management tool on the market, and it is the reason the register earns its cost. When a renewal is approaching, somebody has to decide whether the terms are still right, find out what the market rate now is, and open the conversation with the supplier early enough to have leverage. That is work, and it is work that gets deferred because it is never urgent until it is too late. We do it. The notice is drafted and served in the form and to the address the contract requires, which is a surprisingly common point of failure: notices sent by email where the contract demands post, or to a trading address rather than the registered office, are regularly ineffective. The renegotiation is opened on your behalf, with the comparison already done. Where a supplier meeting is the right route, we take it. Over time the register also becomes the evidence base for decisions that used to be guesses: which suppliers have quietly escalated their prices every year, which customer terms differ from your standard and why, and where the same risk has been accepted twenty times because twenty different people signed twenty documents without anybody seeing the pattern.
Where specialists come in
Where a renewal or termination requires regulated advice — property, employment transfer, regulated licensing — the relevant specialist is instructed and controlled by us.
Related results
All results →Sectors we run this for
Related insights
All insights →Where nine per cent of your revenue goes
Contract value rarely leaks in a single expensive event. It leaks quietly, through renewal dates nobody owns.
Your break clause is a deadline, not an option
Most break clauses fail on a condition nobody read, not on a decision anyone took.
- How is this different from contract management software?
- Software stores documents and sends alerts. It does not decide whether to exercise a break, negotiate the renewal, or draft and serve the notice. This is a retained function that does those things, and the register is the tool it uses rather than the service itself.
- How long does it take to build the register?
- For a typical founder-led business, a few weeks from receiving access to a first complete register, with the dates and renewals loaded first because those are the ones that expire while the work is going on. Larger estates take longer, and are built in order of what expires soonest.
- What if we cannot find some of our contracts?
- That is normal, and the gaps are recorded explicitly rather than quietly left out. Where an agreement is missing we reconstruct the position from purchase orders, invoices and correspondence, and where it matters we ask the counterparty for a copy, which is a routine request.
- Who owns the data if we stop?
- You do. The register is your business record and it is exported to you in a usable structured form, not held hostage in a proprietary system. A register you cannot take with you is worth considerably less than one you can.
- What actually happens when a renewal is coming up?
- You get a flag well before the notice window opens, with the terms, the value, and a recommendation. If the decision is to renegotiate or exit, we draft and serve the notice in the required form and open the conversation. You decide; the work is not left with you.
- Does this cover leases as well as supplier contracts?
- Yes. Leases are usually where the largest sums sit, and rent reviews, break clauses and service charge provisions are exactly the dates that get missed. They are treated as part of the estate rather than as a separate property matter.
- Can you take over a register we have already started?
- Yes. We audit what exists, check the abstracted fields against the underlying documents, because errors in an inherited register are common and dangerous, and then take over running it.
- How does this help when we sell the business?
- Diligence on contracts is one of the slowest and most expensive parts of a sale. A complete register with change-of-control and assignment positions already recorded turns weeks of work into an export, and removes the discovery of un-assignable revenue at the point where it costs you price.