Contracts and renewals
Tracking AMCs and auto-renewing IT contracts
An auto-renewing IT contract is caught by tracking its renewal date, its notice period and the date notice must be served by, not just its expiry. Atlas holds every AMC and vendor contract with those dates per property, flags what is about to renew, and shows the annual value at stake. Atlas is built by Sulayo, a Dubai product studio.
Why do auto-renewals get missed?
An auto-renewal is missed because the date that matters is not the date anybody is watching. A contract expiring on the 31st of March with a ninety-day notice period has to be cancelled by the end of December, and the reminder that fires in March is three months too late to be of any use. Contracts also tend to live with whoever signed them, so the knowledge leaves when that person does, and a group with thirty properties has thirty filing habits.
What should be recorded against a contract?
The renewal date, the notice period, the date by which notice has to be served, the annual value, the currency, the vendor, the property or properties it covers, and whether it renews automatically at all. Atlas records these per contract, which is what allows a single view of what is about to renew across the whole estate rather than per property. The last field is the one most registers omit and the one that decides whether the rest matter.
How does Atlas surface a renewal before it is too late?
Atlas works backwards from the notice deadline rather than the expiry date, so a contract appears on the renewals view while there is still time to act on it. Ask Atlas answers the same question in a sentence, across the whole estate: which contracts expire this quarter, and what is quietly auto-renewing. The savings register then puts a number against each one, so the conversation with a vendor starts from what the group is about to commit rather than what it already spent.
At a glance
- Dates tracked
- Renewal date, notice period, notice deadline, expiry
- Value tracked
- Annual contract value, in the currency it is billed in
- Covers
- AMCs, vendor contracts, software licences and support agreements
- Scope
- Per property, and group-wide contracts covering many
- Asked in plain language
- Ask Atlas answers renewal questions across the estate, read-only
- Costed
- Auto-renewals appear in the savings register as exposure
Questions people ask
What is an AMC in IT?
An AMC, or annual maintenance contract, is a yearly agreement with a vendor to support and maintain equipment or software: hardware cover, patching, response times and sometimes spares. In hospitality they are common on everything from the property management system to the door locks, and they very often renew automatically unless notice is given.
How much notice do IT contracts usually require?
Thirty, sixty and ninety days are all common, and the number is contract-specific rather than standard, which is exactly why it has to be recorded per contract rather than assumed. A ninety-day notice period on an annual contract means the decision window opens nine months into the term, which is long before anyone is thinking about it.
What should be checked before an AMC auto-renews?
Whether the equipment the contract covers is still in service, whether the price has crept since the last term, whether the response times were actually met, and whether the same cover is now bundled into something else the group already buys. Atlas holds the asset lifecycle next to the contract, so a contract covering retired equipment is visible rather than inferred.
Can Atlas tell which contracts are wasting money?
Atlas runs a savings register that separates three kinds of money: savings available now, exposure from things about to auto-renew, and cost already committed. Contracts covering retired equipment, price creep between terms and dormant AMCs all surface there with a figure attached, and each carries a confidence rating rather than being presented as certainty.
Does Atlas send reminders about renewals?
Renewals surface in Atlas on a dedicated view driven by the notice deadline, and appear in the board pack alongside the rest of the estate's position. The design deliberately favours a view somebody reviews on a rhythm over an email that arrives once and gets archived, because the failure mode with renewals is never that nobody was told.