Contracts Management with Reminder Workflows

A SharePoint Workflows tutorial by Peter Kalmström

Most organizations have contracts that need to be renewed at certain times. In the demos below Peter Kalmström, CEO and Systems Designer of kalmstrom.com Business Solutions, shows how to first create a SharePoint content type for a Contracts library and then create two different workflows that send an e-mail reminder to the responsible person for each contract that is near renewal or expiry date.

"Contracts" content type

Peter creates a new site content type for contracts and adds the following columns:

Signing date, Date and Time with Todays date as default.
Counterparts, Lookup from a "Counterparts" list.
Type of Contract, Choice, without a default value (Peter shows how to use Excel to get the options in alphabetic order.)
Responsible Counsel, Person or Group
Renewal or Expiry Date, Date and Time
Counsel comment, Multiple lines of text with 'Append Changes to Existing Text' enabled

When the content type is finished, Peter associates it with the Contracts document library and removes the default 'Document' content type from that library. He also makes the new columns visible in the library and renames the 'Title' column into "Short Description".

SharePoint 2013 Reminder Workflow

In this flow you must use the internal name for the "Renewal or Expiry Date" column. If you have not used CamelCase naming when you created the column, you can get the code at https://www.urldecoder.org/.

Create a list workflow for the Contracts library.
Go to the end of the workflow.
Create a Local Variable of the type Date/Time, called ReminderDate.
Add an Add Time to Date action: -7 days to the current item Renewal or Expiry Date. Output the value to the variable ReminderDate.
Add a Pause until Date action and select Workflow Variables and Parameters >Variable:ReminderDate for the date.
Add a Send an Email action for the current item Responsible Counsel and Email Address. Add a lookup for the Name of the current item to the Subject.

It is also possible to use a SharePoint 2010 workflow and a retention stage. Then you must first enable retention under 'Information management policy settings' in the library settings and then set when the workflow should run. Peter shows this in the demo below.