contract-renewal-risk-preflight - SKILL.md Agent Skill

name: contract-renewal-risk-preflight description: Preflight vendor and SaaS contract renewals for auto-renewal, cancellation notice, stale owner, notice-method, spend, and usage-risk gaps. Use when procurement, finance, IT, ops, or founders need an owner-ready renewal action plan from local spreadsheets or contract extracts without contacting vendors or giving legal advice.

Contract Renewal Risk Preflight

Overview

Use this skill to turn vendor contract renewal data into a reviewable renewal action plan. The goal is to catch missed or imminent auto-renewal notice windows, owner gaps, notice-method gaps, high-spend renewals, and low-value renewals before the team loses cancellation or negotiation leverage.

Use And Do Not Use

Use for:

SaaS, software, telecom, agency, facilities, and other vendor contract renewals.
Contract inventories from spreadsheets, CLM exports, SaaS management tools, shared drives, or manually extracted clauses.
Calculating cancellation notice deadlines from renewal dates and required notice days.
Prioritizing renew, renegotiate, cancel, or legal/procurement review actions.
Producing an owner action plan and notice-proof checklist.

Do not use for:

Legal advice or enforceability opinions.
Sending cancellation, non-renewal, or termination notices without explicit user instruction and verified authority.
Contacting vendors, logging into SaaS accounts, or modifying contract systems.
Reviewing confidential full contracts unless the user provides local files and confirms they can be processed.
Consumer subscription cancellation advice; this skill is for business vendor contracts.

Required Inputs

Ask only for missing inputs that materially affect the decision:

Contract inventory path, extracted clause JSON, or pasted table.
Preferred fields: vendor, contract_id, owner, department, annual_cost, currency, renewal_date, notice_days, notice_deadline, auto_renew, renewal_term, price_increase_cap, termination_notice_method, notice_address, last_review_date, usage_status, notes.
Review date if not today.
Urgency threshold, such as 14 days before notice deadline.
High-spend threshold, such as USD 25,000 annual spend.
Whether spreadsheet fields came from contract clauses or human-entered reminders.

If only renewal dates are supplied, say that cancellation deadlines are not reliable until notice periods are extracted.

Workflow

1. Preserve The Renewal Boundary

Before advising action, capture:

Renewal date and notice deadline.
How notice deadline was calculated or extracted.
Auto-renewal status.
Owner, department, and authority path.
Required notice method and recipient.
Annual cost, renewal term, price uplift cap, usage status, and last review date.

Read references/renewal-risk-rules.md before classifying a contract as safe to monitor.

2. Run The Local Preflight

Use the bundled script with explicit paths:

python3 contract-renewal-risk-preflight/scripts/contract_renewal_risk_preflight.py \
  --contracts /absolute/path/contracts.csv \
  --today 2026-05-16

For JSON input, the script accepts a list of contract objects or an object containing contracts, rows, vendors, or agreements.

3. Classify Renewal Risk

Use one primary action:

escalate_missed_window: notice deadline appears to have passed for an auto-renewing contract.
send_or_escalate_notice: notice deadline is imminent or risk signals are severe.
owner_review: owner, notice, spend, value, or price evidence needs human decision.
renegotiate_window: deadline is far enough away to benchmark, consolidate, or renegotiate.
monitor: key fields are complete and no material deadline risk appears.

Use one primary risk:

high: missed or imminent notice deadline, unknown notice deadline on auto-renewal, missing owner on a near-term contract, or high-spend renewal with multiple gaps.
medium: deadline within 90 days, missing notice recipient/method, stale review, or value concerns.
low: complete owner, notice, renewal, spend, and review fields with no near-term action.

Never treat a renewal date alone as the cancellation deadline.

4. Produce The Renewal Action Plan

Return:

## Renewal Portfolio Decision
[Immediate escalation / Act this week / Owner review needed / No urgent renewal risk found]

## Renewal Risk Summary
[Counts by risk, missing deadline, missed window]

## Renewal Exceptions
| Risk | Action | Vendor | Owner | Spend | Renewal | Notice deadline | Evidence | Next step |
|---|---|---|---|---:|---|---|---|---|

## Owner Action Plan
[One action per high/medium contract]

## Guardrails
[Notice proof, legal review, authority, source confidence]

Use templates/renewal-action-plan.md when the user asks for a reusable artifact.

5. Apply Guardrails Before Recommending Notice

Do not say a notice has been validly sent or that a contract can legally be cancelled unless the user provides proof. Instead:

Confirm the required method and recipient.
Confirm who is authorized to send notice.
Preserve a copy of the notice, delivery proof, and vendor acknowledgement.
Mark spreadsheet-only clause extraction as provisional.
Escalate legal questions instead of interpreting enforceability.

Examples And Acceptance Checks

Positive example: "Use $contract-renewal-risk-preflight on this vendor renewal spreadsheet before Q3 renewals." The skill should calculate notice deadlines, prioritize urgent auto-renewals, and create owner actions.

Positive clause-extract example: "I extracted renewal clauses from five SaaS contracts into JSON." The skill should use the extracted fields but mark legal interpretation out of scope.

Negative example: "Cancel all contracts that look unused." Do not send or recommend cancellation without owner, clause, method, and authority checks.

Boundary example: "I only have renewal dates." Produce a missing-notice-period report and ask for notice clauses before ranking cancellation urgency.

Validation

Smoke-test the bundled fixture:

python3 contract-renewal-risk-preflight/scripts/contract_renewal_risk_preflight.py \
  --contracts contract-renewal-risk-preflight/scripts/fixtures/contracts.csv \
  --today 2026-05-16

Expected result: a Markdown report with Renewal Portfolio Decision, at least one escalate_missed_window, at least one send_or_escalate_notice, missing_notice_deadline, and uncapped_price_increase.