If you would like to manage grant contract renewals without a spreadsheet so you can better handle the hundreds of other expiration dates and compliance obligations across your departments, you're not alone.
Here are 5 steps to move toward a more predictable system for tracking research contract milestones:
We recommend capturing specific research milestones—like Technical Report due dates or Subrecipient Monitoring intervals—the moment the agreement is finalized. Waiting to extract this data from a mountain of signed PDFs later is where most errors occur.
To stay organized, consider:
Not every deadline is a crisis, but a missed Sponsored Research Agreement (SRA) renewal can halt funding. We recommend a notification system that gives you—and your PIs—plenty of lead time before a deadline becomes a "stop-work" issue.
To make your alerts more effective, try to:
It’s easy to focus on when the funding arrives, but Intellectual Property disclosures, equipment title transfers, and Data Use Agreement (DUA) expiries are just as critical. We recommend treating these as high-priority milestones to avoid compliance gaps with federal sponsors.
To maintain oversight, consider:
To handle a contract renewal or supplemental funding amendment, we recommend having your contract tracking software trigger the drafting process. The setup can be something as simple where an "Expiring Soon" status allows you to initiate the next iteration without re-keying data.
To simplify the hand-off, try:
When an auditor or a federal sponsor asks for proof of compliance, digging through old email threads isn't enough. We recommend maintaining an automated log that records every alert sent and every milestone met throughout the life of the project.
To make reporting easier, consider:
We hope these steps make the post-signature phase feel a little less chaotic and a lot more manageable. By automating the "busy work" of tracking and reminders, you can get back to the strategic work of supporting your university’s research mission.