Most SMEs run at half capacity in July and August. Fewer meetings, fewer deadlines, half the team away. That is usually treated as a cost. It is also the only window in the year where you can block out half a day and nothing breaks.
Spend it on your contracts. Not on rolling out a system or drafting a policy, but on the plain question of what you are paying for, what nobody uses any more, and what has quietly drifted above market price. What follows is four rounds, about four hours in total, spread across a week. Each one stands on its own and none of them needs anyone else's approval.
Why July beats November
By November you are in the middle of budgeting, most renewals are about to trigger, and nobody has an afternoon to spare. In July you have the time, and more importantly, you still have room to act on what you find.
That second part is what matters. Most notice periods run between one and three months. Find out in July that a contract expires on 31 December and you have five months to renegotiate or switch. Find out in November and the deadline has usually passed, which locks you into another full term.
Round 1: get everything onto one list (about 60 minutes)
Do not start by tidying. Start by counting. Open your bank account, filter the last twelve months for recurring payments, and write down every supplier that appears more than once. Then do the same for your credit card statements, because that is where the software subscriptions nobody registered tend to hide.
Expect to be surprised. Loio found that 71% of businesses cannot locate at least 10% of their contracts when they go looking for them (Loio, Contract Management Statistics & Trends 2026). WorldCC measured that contract data sits across an average of 24 separate systems per organisation (WorldCC, August 2025). An SME does not have 24 systems, but the director's mailbox, a shared drive folder and the bookkeeper's records are already enough to lose track.
Nothing needs judging yet. One list with supplier, annual spend, and the question "do we actually have a signed contract for this?" is enough. What you are building is the rough draft of a contract register.
Round 2: cut what nobody uses (about 90 minutes)
Work down the list and ask one question per line: who in this business would notice if this stopped tomorrow?
If you cannot name that person, you are probably looking at a ghost licence, a subscription that survived a reorganisation, a departure, or a switch to a different tool. Gartner estimates that roughly 40% of SaaS spend inside organisations goes unmonitored (Gartner, 2024). Not all of that is waste, but a meaningful slice of it is.
Watch for duplication in this round too. Two tools doing the same job, two cleaning firms for two sites, three suppliers for office consumables. This builds up on its own once people buy what they need without any agreement on how. The Hackett Group calculated that 10 to 20% of targeted procurement savings evaporate through maverick buying, purchases made outside existing contracts. In businesses with long supplier tails, such as wholesale, that adds up quickly.
Mark every line as keep, cancel, or investigate. You do not need finer categories than that yet.
Round 3: put the deadlines in the diary (about 45 minutes)
For everything you want to cancel or reconsider, find two dates in the contract: the end date and the last date you can give notice. The second one is rarely written down. You have to work it out by subtracting the notice period from the end date, and checking whether notice runs against the end of the term or the end of a calendar month.
Then put the notice deadline minus six weeks in your diary, not the end date. Those six weeks are your working room: time to request an alternative quote, agree internally, and actually send the letter.
This is the step that changes the outcome. Loio found that 71% of contracts are never monitored for compliance or deviation after signature (Loio, 2026). Contracts do not renew because somebody chose to renew them. They renew because nobody looked in time. If you want the mechanics of how automatic renewal works in practice, and when a supplier can and cannot rely on it, our guide to cancelling a business contract walks through it.
While you are in there, read the termination clause of your two largest contracts. If either one carries a six-month notice period or longer, that is a point for the next negotiation.
Round 4: test three contracts against the market (about 60 minutes)
Pick the three most expensive contracts that have run for two years or more without the price being discussed. Request a single quote from an alternative supplier for each one. Not to switch, but to find out where you stand.
That is testing market conformity, and it is the cheapest form of saving there is. No tender to organise, no need to tell your current supplier anything. You only want to know whether the gap is 3% or 25%.
If the gap turns out to be large, you have a specific conversation to hold in September. Our step-by-step guide to renegotiating a supplier contract covers how to run it without damaging the relationship.
What it comes to
Run the numbers conservatively for a business with 40 active contracts and 300,000 euros of annual supplier spend:
- Two subscriptions cancelled that nobody was using: 4,000 euros per year
- One contract renegotiated after a quote comparison, 12% lower: 5,400 euros per year
- One renewal you let run deliberately this year rather than by accident: 6,000 euros per year
That is over 15,000 euros against four hours of work, and it does not reset. The notice deadlines are in the diary now, so next year does not start from zero.
For context, World Commerce & Contracting puts the average revenue lost to weak contract management at 9.2% per year (WorldCC, August 2025). Four hours in the summer will not take that to zero, but it does take out the easiest part of it.
What you stop having to do
The point of this cleanup is not to repeat it every July. The point is to do it once and then keep it current. Once every contract sits in one place with its supplier, end date, notice period and internal owner, the job changes from searching to checking.
That is the difference between holding contracts and running contract portfolio management: less administration rather than more. And once everything is in one place, it becomes useful. A spend analysis across your full supplier base stops being a two-day exercise and becomes a two-minute one.
Start with round 1. It costs an hour and it almost always turns up something you had forgotten you were still paying for.