Contract Renewal Risk Preflight

Overview

Use this skill to turn vendor contract renewal data into a reviewable renewal action plan. The goal is to catch missed or imminent auto-renewal notice windows, owner gaps, notice-method gaps, high-spend renewals, and low-value renewals before the team loses cancellation or negotiation leverage.

Use And Do Not Use

Use for:

• SaaS, software, telecom, agency, facilities, and other vendor contract renewals.
• Contract inventories from spreadsheets, CLM exports, SaaS management tools, shared drives, or manually extracted clauses.
• Calculating cancellation notice deadlines from renewal dates and required notice days.
• Prioritizing renew, renegotiate, cancel, or legal/procurement review actions.
• Producing an owner action plan and notice-proof checklist.

Do not use for:

• Legal advice or enforceability opinions.
• Sending cancellation, non-renewal, or termination notices without explicit user instruction and verified authority.
• Contacting vendors, logging into SaaS accounts, or modifying contract systems.
• Reviewing confidential full contracts unless the user provides local files and confirms they can be processed.
• Consumer subscription cancellation advice; this skill is for business vendor contracts.

Required Inputs

Ask only for missing inputs that materially affect the decision:

• Contract inventory path, extracted clause JSON, or pasted table.
• Preferred fields: vendor, contract_id, owner, department, annual_cost, currency, renewal_date, notice_days, notice_deadline, auto_renew, renewal_term, price_increase_cap, termination_notice_method, notice_address, last_review_date, usage_status, notes.
• Review date if not today.
• Urgency threshold, such as 14 days before notice deadline.
• High-spend threshold, such as USD 25,000 annual spend.
• Whether spreadsheet fields came from contract clauses or human-entered reminders.

If only renewal dates are supplied, say that cancellation deadlines are not reliable until notice periods are extracted.

Workflow

1. Preserve The Renewal Boundary

Before advising action, capture:

• Renewal date and notice deadline.
• How notice deadline was calculated or extracted.
• Auto-renewal status.
• Owner, department, and authority path.
• Required notice method and recipient.
• Annual cost, renewal term, price uplift cap, usage status, and last review date.

Read references/renewal-risk-rules.md before classifying a contract as safe to monitor.

2. Run The Local Preflight

Use the bundled script with explicit paths:

python3 contract-renewal-risk-preflight/scripts/contract_renewal_risk_preflight.py \
  --contracts /absolute/path/contracts.csv \
  --today 2026-05-16

For JSON input, the script accepts a list of contract objects or an object containing contracts, rows, vendors, or agreements.

3. Classify Renewal Risk

Use one primary action:

• escalate_missed_window: notice deadline appears to have passed for an auto-renewing contract.
• send_or_escalate_notice: notice deadline is imminent or risk signals are severe.
• owner_review: owner, notice, spend, value, or price evidence needs human decision.
• renegotiate_window: deadline is far enough away to benchmark, consolidate, or renegotiate.
• monitor: key fields are complete and no material deadline risk appears.

Use one primary risk:

• high: missed or imminent notice deadline, unknown notice deadline on auto-renewal, missing owner on a near-term contract, or high-spend renewal with multiple gaps.
• medium: deadline within 90 days, missing notice recipient/method, stale review, or value concerns.
• low: complete owner, notice, renewal, spend, and review fields with no near-term action.

Never treat a renewal date alone as the cancellation deadline.

4. Produce The Renewal Action Plan

Return:

## Renewal Portfolio Decision
[Immediate escalation / Act this week / Owner review needed / No urgent renewal risk found]

## Renewal Risk Summary
[Counts by risk, missing deadline, missed window]

## Renewal Exceptions
| Risk | Action | Vendor | Owner | Spend | Renewal | Notice deadline | Evidence | Next step |
|---|---|---|---|---:|---|---|---|---|

## Owner Action Plan
[One action per high/medium contract]

## Guardrails
[Notice proof, legal review, authority, source confidence]

Use templates/renewal-action-plan.md when the user asks for a reusable artifact.

5. Apply Guardrails Before Recommending Notice

Do not say a notice has been validly sent or that a contract can legally be cancelled unless the user provides proof. Instead:

• Confirm the required method and recipient.
• Confirm who is authorized to send notice.
• Preserve a copy of the notice, delivery proof, and vendor acknowledgement.
• Mark spreadsheet-only clause extraction as provisional.
• Escalate legal questions instead of interpreting enforceability.

Examples And Acceptance Checks

Positive example: "Use $contract-renewal-risk-preflight on this vendor renewal spreadsheet before Q3 renewals." The skill should calculate notice deadlines, prioritize urgent auto-renewals, and create owner actions.

Positive clause-extract example: "I extracted renewal clauses from five SaaS contracts into JSON." The skill should use the extracted fields but mark legal interpretation out of scope.

Negative example: "Cancel all contracts that look unused." Do not send or recommend cancellation without owner, clause, method, and authority checks.

Boundary example: "I only have renewal dates." Produce a missing-notice-period report and ask for notice clauses before ranking cancellation urgency.

Validation

Smoke-test the bundled fixture:

python3 contract-renewal-risk-preflight/scripts/contract_renewal_risk_preflight.py \
  --contracts contract-renewal-risk-preflight/scripts/fixtures/contracts.csv \
  --today 2026-05-16

Expected result: a Markdown report with Renewal Portfolio Decision, at least one escalate_missed_window, at least one send_or_escalate_notice, missing_notice_deadline, and uncapped_price_increase.