Problem
Renewal Surprises and Disconnected Vendor Data
A mid-sized professional services firm found itself on the hook for a $150,000 contract renewal—triggered automatically without anyone realizing it. With a small IT team and decentralized processes, vendor oversight was fragmented across Salesforce instances, Excel spreadsheets, and individual inboxes. The internal Salesforce system had been built by external consultants, and access to updates was bottlenecked by consultant availability.
The Director of IT, juggling a lean support team, was under mounting pressure from leadership to prevent further contract surprises and streamline visibility. The accounting liaison was manually collecting vendor details such as spend, MSA status, and renewal dates—then reconciling it in an exported spreadsheet. Legal lacked a clear system to track which vendors had master service agreements in place. It was clear the firm needed a more autonomous, scalable system that wouldn’t rely on external dependencies.
Q1
Solution
A Centralized Vendor Management Workflow
With SmartSuite, the team built a dedicated Vendor Management solution that mapped vendors, contracts, and MSAs into one cohesive system. They started by importing existing Excel data and Salesforce exports into SmartSuite’s relational structure. With the platform’s Linked Records, Dashboards, and Automations, the team created an oversight system that proactively notified stakeholders 60 days before renewals—eliminating future auto-renewal risks.
Legal workflows were set up using Custom Views to filter vendors by MSA status. A dedicated legal tab surfaced missing agreements, enabling the legal team to assess and update contracts efficiently. Dashboards visualized contract timelines and spend buckets, replacing reliance on pivot tables and siloed tracking.
The IT Director and Accounting Liaison could now build, adjust, and own the process directly—without relying on external developers. SmartSuite’s no-code tools made it easy to design a lifecycle-driven workflow that worked across departments.
Q2
Result
Peace of Mind, Legal Control, and Cross-Team Adoption
SmartSuite transformed vendor oversight from a reactive fire drill to a proactive system with built-in accountability. The team went from managing vendors in spreadsheets to running a workflow that captured:
- Renewal alerts tied to contract expiration windows
- Legal visibility into MSA status and contract owners
- Spend buckets organized by department for better budgeting
- Unified records for all 100+ vendors with contract metadata
As the Director of IT shared, "We were tracking everything manually. Now we’re confident no vendor slips through the cracks."
The visual dashboards provided leadership with real-time contract intelligence, while the IT team could scale confidently without consultant delays. The accounting liaison highlighted, "We can now track which vendors have MSAs and flag any gaps. Legal finally has what they need."
The platform's flexibility has inspired future plans to expand SmartSuite usage into budgeting, project management, and compliance.
Q3
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