Contracts are the blueprints of your business. They define commitments, build relationships, and shape daily operations. Yet, many companies still store their contracts in outdated spreadsheets and SharePoint folders. These makeshift repositories create clutter, demand constant upkeep, and slow down your ability to find and verify key information.
You might think “do-it-yourself” (DIY) tools give you more control, but underneath the surface there are always:
It's like using an old flip phone to browse the Internet—you can do it, but it's slow, and you’re missing out on a whole world of functionality. Over the past few years, we’ve met hundreds of companies and seen that their cobbled-together repositories rarely lead to a single source of truth for contracts, which is essential for any useful contract management system.
Here, we explain how DIY contract repositories hold you back and why contracts deserve thoughtfully designed, purpose-built tools. **This isn’t a pitch for Nomio—**it's about why you shouldn’t DIY a contract repository.
When you navigate your contracts through files, folders, and spreadsheets, you invite chaos. Important information gets buried under layers of clutter and technical limitations. What starts as a shortcut quickly becomes a roadblock—here’s why.
DIY systems often turn into dumping ground for everything remotely legal-looking, like:
Cryptic file names make this mess even worse. No one wants to be the one tasked with finding that one important clause in a sea of contracts named ‘MSA_SIGNEDv3_FINAL_FINALFINAL’.
If you’re somehow able to standardise naming, it's rare for everyone to stick to the rules - especially when multiple people across different teams are uploading new contracts to your folders. Without this consistency, it’s hard to tell what's what, increasing your risk of overlooking important documents.
Effective contract repositories should operate with zero noise. The only way to do this is to ensure every document is correctly identified and catalogued.
It's not just about being disorganised. Files and folders simply aren't built to handle complex agreements. They can't visualise how different parts of a contract relate to each other or which document takes precedence.
Your legal team has to waste time piecing together the structure of an agreement by reviewing individual documents. "How does this unorganised sequence of amendments fit together to vary the original agreement?" "Where are the T&Cs for this Statement of Work?"
It's like trying to build a puzzle without seeing the full picture.
Folders struggle with multi-category agreements. Which folder do you put a compliance software subscription in? IT? Legal? Supplier? If you duplicate it, you risk confusion when the agreement changes. When three decentralised versions of the same contract are scattered across folders and sub-folders, there’s little guarantee any changes will be uniformly reflected across the entire contract portfolio. Conflicted sources of truth like this are fatal to the reliability of a repository.
Folders also can't give you a view of agreements that fall under multiple categories. Want to see all agreements that fall under the intersection of IT and Legal? Since folders were built to silo documents, they don’t give you an intuitive way of executing this kind of search.
The biggest gripe our customers have with folders is privacy. Often, shared repositories will have sub-folders so the right people can see the contracts that relate to them. For example, the People folder exists so the HR department can see what matters to them without wading through irrelevant agreements from other departments. Although this is a valid way of segmenting a contract database, it completely ignores the importance of confidentiality. Folders don't let you set permissions based on individual roles within a department - so you either risk oversharing sensitive information or limit access so much that people can't do their jobs effectively.
A disorganised contract management system is a massive time sink. You spend valuable hours maintaining a flawed system that only creates more problems when you actually need to use it.
As your business grows and you add more contracts, making sense of it all becomes increasingly difficult. The cleanup task grows from challenging to nearly impossible. Before you know it, no one feels responsible for keeping things tidy. Your legal team then wastes excessive time sifting through spreadsheets and folders, trying to find the latest version of an agreement or understanding how scattered documents connect.
Lawyers are great at drafting and interpreting contracts. However, managing a complex database of agreements is a different skill set entirely. Most lawyers aren't data scientists; they shouldn't have to be.
Capturing contract information in spreadsheets might seem straightforward, but it quickly becomes a nightmare. You need a rigid system that outlines what data to capture and how it should be captured. The problem is that contracts are full of edge cases. The more important a contract, the more likely it contains bespoke clauses which behave uniquely and don't fit neatly into predefined categories. Your legal team must constantly adapt their approach to accommodate these edge cases, often forcing information where it doesn't belong. This leads to inconsistencies, making it hard to trust the data in your spreadsheet.
Teams also don’t realise early enough that the burden of maintaining a contract repository never ends.
Information needs to be correct and uniformly expressed perpetually. Ambiguities need to be found and resolved, terms need to be updated whenever there’s an amendment, and so on. In-house teams don’t have the time, resources, or experience to do this. And it’s not what they were hired to do.
The problems multiply when one employee inherits another's DIY system. The blueprint often exists only in one person's head. If they leave, you're left with a massive organisational risk: no one can make sense of the database, and it has to be remodelled entirely to restore any clarity.
When multiple people maintain the repository, each with their own method of documenting information, it gets even messier. What should be a simple handover becomes a complex decoding exercise of each individual’s documentation quirks.
Most DIY contract repositories also can't handle the dynamic nature of contracts. This means you end up leaving out key information or wasting time on manual calculations, increasing the risk of human error. For example, simply inputting the Initial Term Expiry Date won’t tell you the length of the Initial Term by calculating it from the Active Date, and writing down a Renewal Term alongside a Renewal Notice Period won’t generate a sequence of Renewal Dates and Deadlines for you.
Organising documents and capturing key points in a spreadsheet gives you a basic overview of your contracts. But there's no substitute for the contract itself.
A single data point often doesn't tell the whole story. You might type "Indexation: RPI + 3%" into a spreadsheet, but understanding how to apply this needs the full context from the contract. Ultimately, spreadsheets don't let you link information back to the exact phrase and clause it was captured from. This is a fatal flaw; it negates any potential time-savings when you have to dig out the original document to understand a data point's practical application.
Worse still, this means spreadsheets aren't auditable. You can't trace a data point back to its source in the contract to check its accuracy.
One mistake shatters confidence in the entire spreadsheet.
You don’t get 80% of the benefit from an 80% accurate database. Even a slight compromise in accuracy means you’ll avoid making any real decisions based on a spreadsheet and just go looking for the contract instead.
An effective contract management solution solves this by connecting data points to their source in the contract. It also shows its work for automatically generated values not explicitly stated in the text.
DIY setups lack powerful search and filtering functions. You can't get quick insights or answers about your contracts. Sorting a spreadsheet column isn't the same as intelligently filtering agreements based on specific properties. You also can't search for words or phrases across multiple agreements at once. Finding key information takes ages, and you can't get an overview of a specific provision across several documents.
Spreadsheets and folders hamper oversight and accountability. They're static reference tools, not dynamic contract management systems.
You can't generate timelines for upcoming obligations or produce reports listing contracts with shared data points. You end up having to find out the answers to questions like ‘What contracts do I need to stop from auto-renewing in the next few months?’ or ‘Which supplier contracts above a value of £1m are due to expire this year’ through a painstakingly manual process.
DIY systems don't have built-in feedback loops. There’s no baked-in system that allows you to flag, review, and resolve discrepancies and ambiguities systematically. You also can't add notes for context or attach non-legal documents, like proof of completed deliverables. This means you don't have an audit trail of who's done what or manually entered data. Again, without these functionalities, the health of your repository is immediately compromised.
Spreadsheets and folders don't play well with other applications. This frustrates workflows that need your contract repository to sync with tools like CRMs, DocuSign, or Salesforce.
The problems with spreadsheets and folders go beyond inconvenience. They're fundamentally misaligned with modern business needs. You can't achieve your goals as a company when the contracts underpinning your entire business rely on outdated tools lacking the functions and integrations you need for effective workflows.
DIY contract management causes death by a thousand paper cuts. You waste time answering basic questions about your contracts and can't trust the answers you eventually find.
These outdated tools deny you access to valuable contract management, and oversight features that give you critical visibility over your contractual estate. Our customers consistently tell us that DIY solutions cause more problems than they solve.
It's a predictable outcome of using systems that were never designed to handle the unique complexities of contract management. The status quo is our competitor, and we're determined to change it for the better.
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