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For AI agents: a documentation index is available at https://docs.coverbase.com/llms.txt. This page is also available in markdown by appending .md to the URL.
This guide is part of the User Guides collection. It covers the dates on a contract record and the reminders that fire off them. For pulling those dates out of the paper in the first place, see the Document Insights guide.
Every contract record carries a timeline: the dates that matter for renewals, notice, and audits, laid out in order. Reminder emails fire off those dates. This guide explains what each date means, which ones Coverbase calculates, and how to stop a reminder on one contract without touching anything else.

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The timeline at a glance

Open a contract and look at the Terms card on the Overview tab. A track across the top of the card places the dates in order, and the grid under it lists each value beside the terms that produce it. Six dates can appear: Three of the six (Notice due, Internal action, and Audit date) are optional. They appear when they are relevant, and you can turn them off per contract. Effective date, term start, and term end are always shown.
Optional does not mean unimportant. The date makes sense on some contracts and not others, so you decide contract by contract.

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Fixed dates versus calculated dates

Most surprises come from this distinction.

Fixed date

A date you or the document states outright. It sits there until someone changes it. Renewals do not move it: a date the agreement names is a fact, and Coverbase does not rewrite it.

Calculated date

A date Coverbase works out from other values. Notice due to vendor can be calculated as term end minus your notice period. Internal action is calculated as the notice date minus your lead time. Both update automatically when the contract renews.
To see which one you are on, click the date on the track, or its value in the grid. The notice date’s editor opens on Based on term end (calculated) or Fixed date. The internal action’s editor offers Based on notice due or Fixed date.
A calculated date cannot be deleted. If Notice due to vendor is set to Based on term end, deleting it does nothing. It is re-derived from term end minus the notice period when you save, and it comes back for as long as those two values exist. This is the usual cause of a date that will not go away.
The notice date has a third setting for exactly that situation: No notice date. Pick it when the contract has no notice deadline to track, or when the deadline would only ever be derived from a term end you are guessing at. It leaves the date blank, stops its reminders, and keeps your term end and notice period intact. Term end can be worked out too. Its editor offers From term start: term start (or the effective date, when no term start is set) plus the initial term. Coverbase saves the result as an ordinary date, and from then on each renewal rolls it forward by the renewal term.
No notice date and hiding the milestone answer different questions. Choose No notice date when the statement is about the agreement: there is no such deadline. Hide the milestone when the statement is about your attention: the deadline is real, but you do not want to be reminded on this contract. Either one stops the emails.

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What makes a contract renew

A renewal needs two things on the record, and it is the second one people forget.

Auto-renews is Automatic

The setting that says renewal happens without anyone doing anything.

Renewal term is filled in

The length each renewal adds. Without it there is nothing to move the term end to.
Both are on the Terms card: click Auto-renews or Renewal term to open the Renewal editor. A nightly job looks at every contract whose term end has passed, and each one either renews or is marked expired.
Set to auto-renew with no renewal term, a contract gets marked expired. Not renewed, and not left alone: the job has no term to roll it into, so it does the only other thing it can. The status flips to expired on the term end the paperwork names, which on a long-running agreement can be a date years in the past.This is the most common cause of “our contracts show the wrong dates”. The contracts really are renewing in the world. Coverbase was never told what they renew into.
Filling in the renewal term fixes it going forward and backward at once. The next nightly run renews the contract, moves the term end, puts back the status it had before it expired, and re-derives the notice and internal action dates that hang off the term end.
To find these across the portfolio in one go, click the Missing renewal details card on the contracts list, or filter on Auto-renews is Automatic and Renewal Term is empty.
Expiry is an organization setting, on by default. The Automatic expiration card on the contract statuses page (Configuration → Statuses → Contract, or Actions → Configure lifecycle on any contract) lets someone who can edit organization settings turn it off and choose the status an expired contract moves to. Only a contract whose status is in the Started group, or that has no status, is expired. A contract whose status is in the Canceled group is never renewed or expired.

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Where the renewal term comes from

Three paths fill it, so most contracts arrive with it already set:
  • Document extraction. Coverbase reads the renewal term out of the agreement along with the other dates, with a page citation.
  • Spreadsheet import. The contract import template has a Renewal Term column. Fill it in the same shape as the other term columns, for example 1 year or 12 months.
  • By hand. Click Renewal term on the Terms card and enter it in the Renewal editor.

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Recording what you intend to do

A renewal date tells you when to decide. It does not record what you decided, which is why renewals get re-litigated in the week they are due. The Renewal decision row of the Terms card takes that answer. Click Record decision (or Change decision) and choose Not decided, Renew, Terminate, or Under review, with a note for the reasoning. The row then shows who recorded it and when. The decision also shows in the Renewal decision column of the contracts list and in the preview panel, and it is filterable across the portfolio.
A renewal clears the decision. When a contract rolls into a new term, the decision and its note go back to empty on purpose. The old answer was about the term that ended, and the new one deserves its own look.Nothing is lost: every decision is filed in the contract’s activity trail with the note, who recorded it, which term it was about, and that term’s end date. The card shows the current term, the trail shows the history.

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Who gets reminded, and when

Reminders are email, and they come from two places:
1

Organization-wide rules

Set once for the whole org from the contracts list, under Actions → Configure notification. For example: “email 60, 30, and 7 days before the notice due date.” Every contract inherits these unless it has its own rules.
2

Contract-specific rules

Set on one contract with Configure on the Reminders row of the Terms card, or Actions → Configure reminders in the contract header. Both are for admins. These replace the org-wide rules for that trigger on that contract, which is useful for a contract that needs six months of warning instead of one.
Recipients are the contract’s relationship owners and watchers, plus any extra addresses on the rule. The Reminders row says how many reminders are scheduled and whether they are inherited from the global settings or set for this contract. Click it to see exactly what is queued and who will receive it.
The org-wide notification settings apply to every contract. Changing them to silence one contract silences it everywhere. Use the per-contract control below instead.

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Turning off a reminder for one contract

There are two ways, and neither touches any other contract. Use No notice date (above) when the contract has no notice deadline. Use the steps below (hiding the milestone) when the deadline is real but you do not want to be reminded about it here. Hiding works on all three optional dates, whether they are fixed or calculated.
1

Open the contract and find the timeline

On the contract’s Overview tab, find the Terms card.
2

Click the date you want to silence

Click Notice due, Internal action, or Audit date on the track. The editor opens.
3

Choose Hide and stop reminders

At the bottom of the editor, select Hide and stop reminders. The date leaves the timeline (the notice and internal action marks read Hidden instead) and its reminder emails stop for this contract.
What that does, precisely:
  • The reminders stop for this contract only. Your org-wide rules are untouched, and every other contract keeps reminding as before.
  • Nothing is deleted. The date, the notice period, and the page citation from the source document all survive.
  • It is reversible. Click the Hidden mark, or use the + (Add milestone) beside the track, to bring the date back with its value and reminders intact.
Silencing Notice due to vendor also silences both notice reminders (the notice-due one and the older termination-notice one, which name the same date) and the Internal action reminder when that date is set to Based on notice due, because it is only a lead time on the notice deadline.An Internal action date you have pinned to a Fixed date is a commitment of its own and keeps reminding. Hide it separately if you do not want it.
The reminder details tell you when this is in effect: open the Reminders row, and a line at the bottom names each hidden date, so a rule that looks configured but never fires is explained.

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Hiding for this term only

On a contract that renews automatically and has a renewal term, the editor offers a second choice above Hide and stop reminders: Hide until this contract renews. The reminders stop for the current term and start again on their own when the contract renews, and the reminder details say so. Use it when you have decided to let this term roll over and want the countdown back next term, rather than never again. It is offered on a notice date set to Based on term end, and on an internal action that follows it. A fixed date and the audit date do not move when the contract renews, so there would be nothing left to remind you about, and the choice is not offered there.

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Which one to reach for

The clearest case is an estimated term end. If the term end is your best guess rather than a date the contract states, a notice deadline calculated from it is also a guess, and being reminded to act on a guess is noise. No notice date is the right choice here: the derived deadline is not real. Keep the estimated term end for planning; switch the notice date back to Based on term end if the term end firms up. Hiding fits when the deadline is real and you do not want to be reminded of it:
  • A contract that auto-renews on terms you are happy with, where you do not intend to give notice. If that is a decision about this term only, use Hide until this contract renews.
  • An audit date that belongs to a different team’s process and should not page yours.
  • A contract in the middle of renegotiation, where the current dates are about to be replaced.

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Seeing every contract’s dates at once

The dates on one contract drive its reminders. To see them across the portfolio, use the renewal runway on the contracts list page.
Renewal runway with one lane per contract showing the notice deadline, the required notice span, and the current term end

The renewal runway. Each contract is a lane, with its notice deadline, required notice span, and term end.

The runway is the second view of the contracts list, behind the toggle on the toolbar. It draws one lane per contract on a year of days from today: a hollow circle on the notice due to vendor date, a filled dot on the term end, and a line between them for the notice you have to give. Hover either mark to read its date. A lane with no notice date says so where the circle would be, so a missing deadline is never mistaken for a distant one.
The notice date is the one that binds. A term ending in April may need notice in January, and on the runway that is the hollow circle three months to the left of the dot.
For the toggle and the rest of the list page, see the Contracts workspace guide.

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Manage reminders from MCP or the API

You can read and change reminder rules and alert settings from an MCP client, and read contract dates with an API key. An MCP client reads with query_platform(kind="rules") and query_engagements_contracts(kind="contract_alert_settings"). It changes rules with mutate(entity="rule", action=...) (create, update), the quiet hours and weekly cap with mutate(entity="contract_alert_settings", action="update"), and stops alerts for one contract with mutate(entity="contract", action="set_alert_suppression"). The reminder rule routes are /v1/rules. See Reminder rules. They need organization settings permission, which API keys do not hold, so use a key created by a person whose role holds it. Contract dates come back on GET /v1/contract-records/{contract_id}. Before an MCP client sends a write, it shows you the change and waits for you to confirm it. The MCP tool reference lists every field.

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Troubleshooting

Document Insights guide

Where the dates come from: define the fields Coverbase extracts from every document, each with a page citation.

Contract Guardian guide

The language-level half of contract intelligence: clause sets, risk tiers, and clause reviews.