Although you have ensured all your contracts are safely stored and only authorized personnel has access to them, you still may struggle with finding the right contract fast enough. And in addition it may be hard to keep track on all contracts in place, still effective, already terminated etc.

The thing that helps you with this is a contracts ledger or listing. Either way you want to call it, the idea stays the same. Essentially it’s a ledger which holds all relevant information about all contracts agreed by the company.

To ensure this listing works though, the very first thing you need to do, is number all your agreements in a manner they are easily identifiable, you are able to sort them by types (i.e. keeping supplier contracts with one similar coding and employer contracts under different referencing) and obviously find them from the very listing itself.

Essentially you can put whatever information you find useful to the list, however the things which usually are registered are as follows:

– agreement name and number;
– agreement type;
– the other party the agreement was made with;
– any relevant other party contacts from the agreement;
– the date of the agreement;
– the object agreed;
– the term (if applicable);
– the amount payable (and any monthly or periodical fee if applicable);
– person responsible;
– department it relates to – identifies people who should have access to it (if applicable);
– can it be renewed (and if then on what terms);
– etc.

As you can see, quite a lot of information can and should be stored in this listing. It may very well decrease the need to look for the original contract itself in essence. So do consider starting this listing for all your contracts in place and notice how you can save time and have a clear overview of contracts in place. Bear in mind that updating and keeping this list should be the responsibility of one person to ensure it is kept properly, with same care and in similar form. All in all there should only be one list people work with.