Personal Project · Back-Office Automation · RPA / No-Code

A missed cancellation window auto-renews a contract for another year — unwanted spend adds up fast when nothing's watching for it.

The answer

Renewal Guard

Contract & license auto-renewal deadline tracker — built and published, running daily.

Live and running Zapier Automation, scoped around a real back-office automation role in a famous Ad & Media Company.

Back-office teams manage dozens of vendor contracts, SaaS licenses, insurance policies, and staffing agreements — many with auto-renewal clauses that require cancellation notice by a specific date, or the contract silently renews for another term. Tracking this usually means a spreadsheet nobody consistently checks. I built Renewal Guard: a daily automation that calculates each contract's real cancellation deadline, drafts a tone-matched AI reminder as that date approaches, and sends it to the real owner — live, not a mockup.

Who Back-office contract owners Legal, HR/staffing, insurance, IT/infosec, and facilities — whoever owns a given vendor relationship.

What Catch the deadline before it's missed Calculate the real cancellation window, then escalate urgency automatically as it closes in.

Why Live, not a spec A published, running automation — the one piece of this whole portfolio that's actually deployed today.

$ Impact 4–6% catch rate Baseline: 2–3 renewals caught per 50 contracts ($8K–$15K avg. value/yr). Scaled to 500 contracts, that's an estimated $160K–$450K/yr in prevented unwanted spend.

The problem

Auto-renewal is the default, not the exception

Most vendor contracts, SaaS licenses, and insurance policies auto-renew unless someone actively cancels within a notice window — commonly 30 to 90 days before the renewal date.

Ownership is scattered, tracking is manual

A given company's contracts span legal, HR, accounting, and IT — each function tracks its own, usually in a spreadsheet nobody's on the hook to check daily. The omission is silent until the renewal charge shows up.

Built with

Google Sheets as the system of record, orchestrated by Zapier (schedule trigger, loop, filter), with Claude drafting the reminder copy and Gmail delivering it — a 6-step automation, published and running daily.

What's built versus what's still designed

Built & verified Designed, not yet built

Google Sheet system of record, with live calculation formulasBuilt
6-step Zap published and turned on, running dailyBuilt
AI-drafted, urgency-matched reminder copy (Claude)Built
Real email delivered end-to-end in a live test runBuilt
Write-back audit log (Last Reminder Sent, Reminder Count)Designed
Manager-escalation tier for ≤3-day/overdue contractsDesigned
Multi-day test against other real users' own real deadlinesDesigned

What it tracks today

Contracts in the system of record

illustrative sample data

Back-office categories covered

legal, HR/staffing, insurance, infosec, facilities, data/research

Urgency tiers, auto-computed

30d / 14d / 3d / overdue

1×/day

Fully automated run

no manual trigger needed

The business case, sized honestly

No measured baseline exists yet — this is a personal build, not a deployed team tool with a usage history. The mechanism itself is what's real; the dollar figure below is an illustrative order of magnitude, not a result.

A missed 30-to-90-day cancellation window doesn't cost a little — it locks the contract into a full extra renewal term. For a back office tracking even 50 real vendor and software agreements averaging $8K–$15K a year, catching just 2–3 renewals that would otherwise have been missed (a 4–6% catch rate) avoids roughly $16K–$45K in unwanted spend annually.

Applied at the scale of a larger back office — say, around 500 contracts — that same 4–6% catch rate means 20–30 renewals caught a year, or roughly $160K–$450K avoided annually. Both figures are illustrative, not measured, but the mechanism (calculate the real deadline, escalate as it closes) is the same regardless of which real numbers eventually go in or how many contracts it's watching.