Find the dates a contract hopes you miss ABSTRACT

The dates that cost money are the ones nobody diarises

The expensive clause in a commercial agreement is almost never the price. It is the auto-renewal: the contract rolls for another twelve months unless you give notice, the notice period is ninety days, and the ninety days expired three weeks before anybody looked at the contract again. Nobody decided to renew. The diary decided.

It happens because of how these documents are read. Somebody reads a lease carefully once, at signature, when the question in their head is whether to sign. The dates that matter are dates in the future relative to a decision that has already been made, so they are noted and not diarised, and the person who would have to act on them in eighteen months is often not the person who read it.

So this pulls out the ones that bite: auto-renewal dates and the notice window that runs before them, termination-notice periods, rent and fee escalation dates, and expiry. It lists them so you can scan them and exports an .ics calendar file, which is the actual point: a reminder in the diary you already watch is worth more than a correct list in a file you will not open again.

It is pattern matching, and it is checkable on purpose

What happens here is matching over the text of the agreement, tuned to the language these clauses are written in. It is not a lawyer and it is not a complete read. It can miss a clause phrased in an unusual way, and it can flag a date that turns out not to be a deadline at all.

Which is why every item links back to the sentence it came from. That is not a nicety; it is the difference between a tool you can rely on and a tool that quietly invents things. Check each one against its sentence before it goes in your calendar, and treat anything that does not have a sentence behind it as absent.

The right way to use it is as a second pair of eyes on a document you have also read. It catches what a person skims past on page eleven of a forty-page lease, at four in the afternoon, in a clause with a heading that does not mention dates. It does not catch what it was not built to recognise, and it does not know what your agreement actually means.

Set the reminder early enough to act on it

A reminder on the day the notice window closes is useless, because serving notice takes a decision and the decision takes people. Put the first one a clear month before the window opens, so there is time to decide whether you want out, and a second at the start of the window itself.

Note who has to serve the notice, how the contract says it must be served, and where it must be sent: agreements routinely specify a method and an address, and a notice served by email when the contract requires post is a notice that was not served. Put that in the calendar entry too, because the person reading it in a year will not have the contract open.

Alongside: REDLINE shows what changed between the version you sent and the version that came back, CLAUSE reads the terms themselves, DIARY works out a deadline and shows the counting, and Calendar takes the exported file without it passing through anybody's server. The document is read here in the tab and is never uploaded.