Contract Management: The Fourteen Field Register

Reviewed 14 September 2026 against primary sources. Every limitation period below is quoted from the statute itself, with the section number, and checked for amendments still pending. How we research and correct.

Contract management is the work of keeping track of what your agreements commit you to after they are signed. Not negotiating them, not signing them: the part afterwards, which nobody owns until something goes wrong.

At small scale the whole discipline is one list, maintained by one named person. This page is what goes in that list, plus the question that gets answered badly almost everywhere, which is how long you are actually required to keep any of it. It is general information about US commercial agreements rather than legal advice, and record retention in particular turns on state law that varies considerably.

What is contract management?

Contract management is everything that happens to an agreement between signature and destruction. It is distinct from contract negotiation, which happens before, and from contract lifecycle management, which is the software category built to support it at scale. Seven things make it management rather than filing.

• You know what is live. A single list of current agreements, produced from the register rather than reconstructed from memory.
• You know when each one ends, and whether it ends or continues.
• You have calculated the notice deadline, which wherever an agreement renews unless you object is a different and earlier date than the end date.
• Somebody owns each agreement by name, because a responsibility assigned to a department is assigned to nobody.
• You track what you owe, not just what the document says. Reports, service levels, insurance certificates.
• You can find the executed copy, with signatures, rather than the last draft that was circulating.
• You know when you may destroy it, which is driven by how long somebody could still sue you.

That table is the deliverable. A spreadsheet with those fourteen columns, one row per agreement, maintained by one person, is contract management at a company below a few hundred contracts. Everything else on this page is detail about how to fill it in.

1. It is administration, and the federal government has enumerated it

“Contract management” sounds vague enough that people assume it means negotiating well. It does not. The clearest available statement of what the job actually consists of comes from federal acquisition, where the functions are written down and counted.

Part 42.302(a) of the Federal Acquisition Regulation enumerates 71 contract administration functions normally delegated to a contract administration office. They are not glamorous:

“Monitor the contractor's financial condition and advise the contracting officer when it jeopardizes contract performance.”

“Perform production support, surveillance, and status reporting, including timely reporting of potential and actual slippages in contract delivery schedules.”

“Accomplish administrative closeout procedures.”

FAR 42.302(a), functions 17, 31 and 65

Most of the 71 are specific to federal procurement and do not scale down to a business with forty agreements. The useful part is the shape they describe: watching, recording, reporting, chasing and closing out. Every one of them happens after signature. A handful do involve negotiation, but of supplemental agreements, novations and forward pricing rates rather than of the original deal.

What to look for: whether anybody in your organization is doing any of that. Where the answer is no, nothing bad happens until a renewal passes or a counterparty asks for something you promised two years ago.

2. Build the register before you build a process

The instinct when somebody is handed responsibility for contracts is to write a policy. Write the list first. A policy describing a process that nobody follows is worth less than a spreadsheet somebody actually maintains.

Start by finding the agreements, which is usually the slow part. They will be in email, in a shared drive, in a filing cabinet, and in the memory of whoever signed them. Work backwards from payments: anything you pay monthly, or that pays you monthly, has a contract behind it somewhere. Then work through the fourteen fields for each one.

Expect the first pass to be incomplete. A register with eleven of fourteen fields filled for thirty agreements is enormously more useful than a perfect record of four.

What to look for: the agreements nobody can find. A contract you cannot produce is a contract whose terms are whatever the other side says they are.

3. Calculate the notice deadline at signing, not later

Field seven is the one that justifies the exercise in money. It is also the only field that requires arithmetic rather than transcription, which is why it gets skipped.

Take the end date. Subtract the notice period the agreement requires. Add a margin for delivery, because a notice clause commonly requires the notice to be received rather than sent, and often specifies a method such as certified mail. The result is a date, and that date goes in your calendar with the delivery address and method in the entry.

A twelve month agreement ending 31 August with a sixty day notice requirement has a real deadline of 2 July. The decision has to be made in June.

A few states do shift part of that burden onto the other side. New York General Obligations Law section 5-903 makes an automatic renewal clause in a contract for service, maintenance or repair unenforceable against the customer unless the supplier gave written notice, personally or by certified mail, at least fifteen and not more than thirty days before the customer's own deadline. California, Illinois and Wisconsin have comparable rules. Treat any of them as a backstop rather than a plan: relying on the counterparty to have sent a reminder is a worse position than having the date in your calendar.

What to look for: any agreement in the register where field seven is blank. That is not a missing data point, it is an unmanaged renewal.

4. One named owner per agreement

The register fails for organizational reasons rather than technical ones, and the failure has a characteristic shape: it goes stale, and nobody notices it has gone stale.

The fix is field ten. Each agreement has a person, by name, who is responsible for it. Not procurement, not legal, not operations: a person. Their job is to know when something changes and to update the row. Assigning it to a department produces the outcome where four people each assume one of the others is watching.

The register itself needs one owner as well, whose job is a quarterly pass: what is new, what ended, what deadline is inside the next six months.

What to look for: whether the last update to the register was more than a quarter ago. That is the signal that the process depends on memory rather than on a routine.

5. How long you actually have to keep a contract

The standard advice is seven years, and it is worth knowing that the number has no clear source. It is not a contract law period, and it is not the general tax period either: the IRS keeps records for three years in the ordinary case, six where income is understated by more than 25 percent, and seven only for a claim relating to worthless securities or a bad debt deduction. What actually decides when a contract can be destroyed is how long somebody can still bring an action on it, which is a limitation period set by state statute.

The spread is wide, and the headline number for a state is rarely the whole answer. North Carolina allows three years for an action on a contract express or implied, but that subsection ends “except those mentioned in the preceding sections or in G.S. 1-53(1)”, and the exceptions move the answer a long way: a contract under seal is ten years, a contract with a city or county is two. California allows four years for a contract founded on an instrument in writing. Ohio allows six, except that its version of UCC 2-725 puts a sale of goods at four and lets the parties cut that to one.

Louisiana is the clearest warning against reading a headline figure. Article 3499 of its Civil Code says:

“Unless otherwise provided by legislation, a personal action is subject to a liberative prescription of ten years.”

Louisiana Civil Code article 3499

Ten years, then. Except that the sentence begins “unless otherwise provided by legislation”, and article 3494 does otherwise provide, at three years, for compensation for services rendered, arrearages of rent, money lent and open accounts. That is most of what a small business register actually holds. In Louisiana, ten years is the exception.

Kentucky makes the same point with dates rather than subject matter. KRS 413.160 sets ten years for “an action upon a written contract executed after July 15, 2014”. Contracts executed on or before that date remain on the older fifteen year clock in KRS 413.090(2). Two identical agreements signed eighteen months apart carry retention obligations five years apart.

Periods also change, and the change itself has a tail. Ohio's was eight years until Senate Bill 13 took effect on 16 June 2021, reducing it to six. Guidance written before then and still circulating gives the wrong number. But SB 13 carried a transition rule, so a claim that accrued before that date runs to the earlier of six years from the effective date or the expiry of the original eight, which means some Ohio files are still on the old clock into 2027.

Three rules follow. Find the period that applies to this contract rather than to contracts generally. Take the longest that could apply. And count from accrual rather than from signature, which is usually the breach but not always, because discovery rules in several states delay accrual where the claimant could not reasonably have known. A ten year agreement in a six year state is at least a sixteen year retention question, and obligations that survive termination push it further.

What to look for: whether your retention policy is a number somebody picked or a date derived per contract. If it is a number, it is either destroying things too early or storing them forever.

6. What the register will not do

It will not tell you whether a clause is enforceable, which depends on your state and the facts. It will not tell you whether a deal is good. It will not surface an obligation nobody entered, which is why field eleven has to be filled in by somebody who has actually read the agreement. And it will not help at all with the contracts you never found, which is why the first pass matters more than the format.

The short version

Contract management is what happens to an agreement after signature, and at small scale it is one register with fourteen fields maintained by one named person. Build the list before you write a policy. Calculate the notice deadline at signing, because it is the only field requiring arithmetic and the only one that prevents an expensive outcome by itself. Give every agreement a named owner rather than a department. And derive your retention date from your state's limitation period rather than from the seven year rule of thumb, because the real range runs from three years in North Carolina to fifteen in Kentucky for older contracts, counted from the last possible breach rather than from the day you signed.

If the immediate problem is that you do not know what your agreements say, RateMyContract will read one back in plain English. For the wider picture, contract lifecycle management covers the software category and whether you need it, the contract checklist works through an agreement point by point before you sign it, and what is a contract covers what makes an agreement binding in the first place.

Where RateMyContract fits in

Field eleven, what you owe, is the one that cannot be filled in from the cover page. It requires somebody to read the agreement and extract the commitments, and that reading is the step people skip. RateMyContract is a free tool that reads one contract and explains it in plain English, flagging clauses people commonly overlook, including renewal terms and the obligations that belong in that column.

It is not a contract register and not a management system. It has no repository, tracks nothing over time, sends no reminders, and stores no list. It has not been independently benchmarked and publishes no accuracy figure, here or anywhere, and it gives no legal advice. What it does is turn an unread agreement into fourteen fields you can actually fill in.

When to get help

A lawyer is worth the fee before you destroy records on a judgment call, where an agreement is already in dispute, or where the limitation position is complicated by tolling, a discovery rule or a contractual variation of the period. A bookkeeper or accountant is the right call on the tax side of retention, which runs on its own clock and is not what this page covers.

Frequently asked questions about contract management

What is contract management?

It is the work of keeping track of what your agreements commit you to after they are signed: what is live, when each one ends or renews, what you owe under it, who owns it internally, and how long you have to keep it. At small scale it is one register maintained by one named person rather than a process or a platform.

What should a contract register contain?

Fourteen fields: counterparty legal name, document type, where the signed copy is, effective date, end date, how it continues, the calculated notice deadline, how notice must be given, the money, a named internal owner, the obligations you owe, governing law and forum, how it ends early, and a destruction date. The notice deadline is the only one requiring arithmetic, which is why it is the one to check first.

How long should you keep a contract?

Long enough that nobody can still sue you on it, which is state law rather than a round number. Written contract periods run from three years in North Carolina through four in California and six in Ohio to ten in Louisiana and Kentucky, with fifteen still applying in Kentucky to contracts executed before 16 July 2014. Count from the last date a breach could occur, not from signature, and confirm your own state.

Is contract management the same as contract lifecycle management?

Contract management is the practice. Contract lifecycle management usually means the software category built to support it at scale, covering intake, drafting, approval, signature, storage, obligation tracking and renewal. You can do contract management with a spreadsheet and a calendar, and most organizations below enterprise scale should.

Who should own contract management in a small company?

One named person, not a department. The register works because somebody is accountable for keeping it current and fails the moment everyone assumes somebody else is watching it. Operations or finance is the usual home. Each individual agreement also needs a named owner, which is field ten in the register.

What does a contract manager actually do?

In federal contracting the work is enumerated: FAR 42.302(a) lists 71 contract administration functions, from monitoring a contractor's financial condition to accomplishing administrative closeout. Most do not scale down to a small business, but the list shows the shape of the job. It is watching, recording, chasing and closing out, all of it after signature rather than before.

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How we checked this page

Every limitation period is quoted from the statute itself rather than from a summary, with the section number given so you can check it. Five states are shown as a range rather than a survey, because all fifty differ and a national statement would be wrong somewhere.

A pending amendment, checked twice. Ohio's code site lists a version of section 2305.06 taking effect on 23 September 2026, nine days after this page was written. Our first check concluded that the bill behind it, Senate Bill 219 of the 136th General Assembly, amended section 2305.041 and not 2305.06, and that nothing here was affected. That was wrong, and it came from reading the legislature's bill summary rather than the enrolled act. The enrolled act amends both sections. What it does to 2305.06 is add a cross-reference to division (B) of section 2305.041 to the list of exceptions at the front of the section. The six year period is genuinely unchanged, so the conclusion held, but it held for a reason we had not established. Recorded here because the point of a checking process is the checking, not the conclusion.

Sources. FAR 42.302, contract administration functions. North Carolina General Statutes section 1-52(1). California Code of Civil Procedure section 337(a). Ohio Revised Code section 2305.06. Louisiana Civil Code article 3499. Kentucky Revised Statutes 413.160 and 413.090. Last reviewed 14 September 2026.