Handing over contracts when a colleague leaves
A step-by-step handover for when a contract owner leaves the business, so that no notice deadline, side agreement or supplier contact falls through the cracks.
- 1
Start as soon as the departure is known
A handover squeezed into someone's last week becomes a transfer of files rather than knowledge. Book at least two sessions with the departing colleague: one to build the list, and one to go through the open issues on each contract. The earlier you start, the more you can still ask while the person who knows the answers is around.
- 2
List every contract they own, wherever it lives
Ask about more than the contracts already in your system. Ask what sits in their inbox, on a personal drive, in a desk drawer or behind a supplier portal only they log into. World Commerce & Contracting found that contract data at the average organisation is spread across 24 different systems (WorldCC, 2025), and a departure is exactly when part of it drops out of sight for good. Anything that turns up and is not yet in your contract register gets added straight away.
- 3
Write down the next deadline for each contract
For every contract on the list you need three dates: the end date, the last day you can still give notice, and any interim moments such as a price review or a scheduled evaluation. The notice date matters most. Miss the notice period on a contract with automatic renewal and you are committed for another full term. Deal with anything whose notice date falls within the next three months first.
- 4
Capture what the contract does not say
Every contract comes with history: a verbal promise from the account manager, a discount negotiated at the last renewal, a complaint that is still open, a plan to switch supplier next time round. Very little of that is written down. Ask the departing colleague to record it in a few sentences as a note against each contract, so their successor does not start from zero.
- 5
Assign each contract to a named person
Do not hand the whole list to one successor by default if the contracts belong elsewhere. A software licence may sit better with IT, a cleaning contract with facilities. What counts is that every contract ends up with a person, not a department. A shared inbox or "the team" as owner means, in practice, that nobody feels responsible. Make sure the new owner has access to your contract system before the handover meeting, not after it.
- 6
Move reminders to the new owner
Reminders in the departing colleague's calendar vanish the day their account is closed. Check for every contract that the notice-date alert now reaches the new owner. Ironclad found that 92 percent of contract management errors are human errors (Ironclad, 2025), and an alert landing in a deactivated mailbox is a textbook example of one.
- 7
Withdraw signing authority and tell your suppliers
If the colleague held a power of attorney to sign on behalf of the company, revoke it and update the trade register if the authority was registered there. Until you do, third parties are entitled to rely on it. Let suppliers who know this person as their contact or signatory know who to deal with from now on. The entry on authorised signatories explains what goes wrong when someone keeps signing without authority.
- 8
Go through the list again after three months
Book a short check three months after the departure. Is every contract still owned by someone who works here? Have invoices arrived for contracts that never made the list? That second pass catches what the first one missed, usually subscriptions the colleague signed up for personally. It is also a sensible moment for the new owner to run a first supplier evaluation, now that they have formed their own view of the supplier.
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