The Land of Forgotten Contracts – Part I: Dangers of the auto-renew

In our last blog post, we provided a high level introduction to some familiar sounding themes in our multi-part series, “The Land of Forgotten Contracts”. This is part one in an ongoing series on common blind spots that businesses have as they manage their business obligations and contracts.

Dangers of the auto-renew
Every vendor wants you to set up auto renew. Auto renew is “no muss, no fuss”. Why do you need more things on your to-do list? It would be awful to forget a renewal and lose something important like your webpage URL. So just set it and forget it they say. It sounds so perfect; why wouldn’t you do it?

While there are plenty of benefits, there are potholes as well. First, renewals for many agreements tend to be for a year or longer. If you no longer want the product or service, you may miss the cancellation date, or you just forget all together, and you are signing up for another long-term commitment. Second, you run the risk being stuck with agreements with out of date pricing. To use an old example from telecom, these are the people that are still renting their landline phones . Lastly, you are relying on vendors reminders or staff memory to cancel renewals. Vendor reminders may come – hopefully in time and hopefully to the right person.

In this series, we want to help businesses recognize these and other common blind spots and provide ways for them to improve the way they manage their business obligations, agreements and contracts. Come back later for the next post in our series.