Renewal Tracking Setup Checklist
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A step-by-step checklist for finding every domain, certificate, subscription, contract, and license your business depends on and getting each date into one calendar with an owner and a reminder ladder.

[ ] List every domain your business owns or depends on, including redirects, old brand names, and the domain your email runs on, and note the registrar for each one.
[ ] Confirm the registrar account email is a shared or role mailbox that at least two people can read, not the personal address of whoever registered the domain.
[ ] Turn on auto-renew for every domain that matters and check that the payment card on file expires after the next renewal date, not before it.
[ ] Enable transfer lock on your domains and record where the login and the two-factor device live so a backup person can get in.
[ ] Export a list of every SSL and TLS certificate, including internal ones, wildcards, and any bought manually, with the expiry date and where each is installed.
[ ] For each certificate, note whether renewal is automated, and test that the automation actually replaces the certificate on the live server rather than only requesting a new one.
[ ] Pull every recurring charge from the last twelve months of card and bank statements and match each one to a subscription with a known renewal date.
[ ] Mark which subscriptions renew annually, which renew automatically, and which require written notice or a portal action to cancel.
[ ] Log every free trial currently running, the date it converts to a paid plan, and the person who started it.
[ ] Gather signed contracts and leases into one folder and extract the end date, the notice period, and the auto-renewal clause from each.
[ ] Calculate the last safe day to give notice for each contract by subtracting the notice period from the end date, and treat that as the real deadline.
[ ] List software licenses, keys, and support plans with their expiry dates, and write down what actually stops working when each one lapses.
[ ] Put every date from the steps above into one shared calendar or register, with one named owner and one named backup per item.
[ ] Write a one-line action note for each item: what to do when the reminder fires, where to do it, and who has to approve it.
[ ] Set a ladder of reminders for each item: an early heads-up for planning, a working reminder when action should begin, and a final escalation that goes to the backup.
[ ] Scale lead times to the effort involved: a card payment needs days, a purchase order or legal review needs weeks, and a contract with a notice window needs the notice period plus a buffer.
[ ] Check that reminders arrive in a channel people actually watch and reach more than one person.
[ ] Run a test: move one item's reminder to tomorrow and confirm the alert arrives and the action note makes sense to the backup without extra explanation.
[ ] Add recording the expiry date to your purchase and contract signing process so new items enter the calendar the day they are created.
[ ] Schedule a monthly or quarterly review to catch stale entries, expired payment cards, and items whose owner has changed roles.
[ ] When someone leaves, reassign every item they owned the same week and update the contact email at each registrar and vendor.
[ ] Keep a short record of each renewal decision, whether renewed, renegotiated, or canceled, so next year's review starts with context instead of guesswork.