Who Should Own SaaS Renewals? A Practical RACI for IT, Finance, and Procurement

Here's the typical chain of events for a mid-market vendor contract. Follow the handoffs and spot where it breaks.

1. IT identifies the need for a new SaaS tool. They evaluate options, run a pilot, pick a vendor.
2. Procurement negotiates the contract — or sometimes IT negotiates directly with the vendor's sales rep.
3. Legal reviews the terms — or sometimes nobody does, and the vendor's standard agreement gets signed unchanged.
4. Finance processes the invoice and sets up recurring payment.
5. IT uses the tool day-to-day and manages the relationship.
6. Twelve months later, the contract auto-renews. Who was supposed to send the cancellation notice?

The answer, in practice, is nobody. IT thinks procurement handles renewals. Procurement thinks finance tracks the dates. Finance thinks IT manages the vendor relationship. Legal signed off at the start and hasn't looked at it since.

The vendor sends a renewal reminder — to the email address of the person who signed the original contract. That person left six months ago. The email bounces or sits unread. The notice window closes. The contract renews at a 7% uplift. Nobody finds out until the invoice arrives.

This isn't a failure of any one department. It's a failure of handoff. The contract changes hands four times between signature and renewal, and at no point does someone explicitly accept ownership of the renewal decision.

At a 20-person company, renewal ownership isn't a problem. The person who signed the contract is probably still there, probably remembers it, and probably handles the renewal themselves.

At 100–500 people, everything changes:

• Contract volume increases faster than headcount. A 200-person company typically has 80–200 vendor contracts. Nobody can hold that in their head.
• Departmental silos form. IT, finance, and procurement become separate teams with separate tools and separate priorities.
• Staff turnover breaks institutional memory. The average tenure at a mid-market company is 2.5–3 years. A three-year contract will almost certainly outlive the person who signed it.
• Decentralised purchasing creates shadow contracts. Department heads sign contracts independently — marketing buys a design tool, HR buys a recruiting platform, engineering spins up cloud services. Finance finds out via the credit card statement.

The inflection point is usually between 50 and 100 vendor contracts. Below that, informal ownership mostly works. Above that, you need a system — and the first thing that system needs is a clear answer to “who owns what.”

RACI is a responsibility assignment framework. For each activity in a process, it defines four roles:

• R — Responsible: Does the work. Executes the task.
• A — Accountable: Owns the outcome. Makes the final decision. There can only be one A per activity.
• C — Consulted: Provides input before the decision is made. Two-way communication.
• I — Informed: Notified after the decision is made. One-way communication.

RACI works well for renewals because the process crosses departments by nature. IT, finance, procurement, and legal all have a role — the question is which role, at which stage.

Here's a practical RACI for mid-market companies (50–500 employees) managing vendor contract renewals. Adapt the specific role titles to your organisation, but keep the structure.

Under 50 Employees (No Dedicated Procurement)

Merge the procurement column into IT or ops. The IT/ops lead becomes both R and A for negotiation and cancellation. Finance retains accountability for budget approval. Legal review may be outsourced or handled by the CEO/COO.

The critical rule: one person must be named as accountable for the renewal decision on every contract. Even if it's the same person for all contracts, make it explicit.

50–200 Employees (Shared Services / Part-Time Procurement)

You might have a finance or operations manager who handles procurement as part of a broader role. They take the procurement column. IT still owns usage review. Finance still owns budget approval.

At this size, the biggest risk is decentralised purchasing. Department heads sign contracts without involving procurement or finance. The fix: a policy requiring all vendor contracts above a threshold (commonly $5,000/year) to be registered centrally.

200–500 Employees (Dedicated Functions)

The RACI table works as-is. The focus shifts from “who does what” to “how do we enforce it” — ensuring handoffs actually happen and alerts reach the right people.

500+ Employees (Enterprise)

At this scale, you're probably already evaluating CLM platforms. The RACI still applies, but the tooling changes. Renewly serves the 50–500 range where you need the structure but not the six-month implementation.

The RACI table is worthless without enforcement. Someone needs to sign a policy that says: “This is how we handle vendor renewals at this company.”

Here's sample policy language you can take to your CFO or Head of Procurement:

Adapt the specifics — the threshold, the timeline, the responsible functions. But the structure holds. The point is to make renewal ownership explicit, documented, and signed off by someone with authority.

A RACI on paper is a start. But paper processes degrade the same way spreadsheets do — slowly, silently, and usually after someone leaves.

Renewly enforces the ownership model at the system level:

Contract owners are required, not optional. Every contract in Renewly has a named owner. When the owner leaves, the system flags unowned contracts until they're reassigned.

Alerts go to the right person at the right time. The 90-day renewal review trigger goes to the contract owner. Budget approval notifications go to the finance admin. Cancellation deadline warnings go to procurement. The RACI isn't a document you hope people follow — it's encoded in the alert routing.

Escalation catches dropped handoffs. If the contract owner doesn't acknowledge the 60-day alert, it escalates. If nobody acts at 30 days, the alert reaches the organisation admin. The gap between IT and procurement that kills most renewal processes is closed by escalation, not by hope.

Role-based access matches the RACI. Admins manage the portfolio. Viewers see the data they need for their role. Nobody accidentally modifies a contract they don't own.

Portfolio analytics give finance the output they need. Total renewal spend by quarter. Value at risk. Contracts inside notice windows. Uplift impact. Finance doesn't need to run the system — they need the dashboard.

If you're reading this because a new exec just asked “show me all our contracts” and you don't have a good answer, here's your first-week plan:

1. Build the register. Pull AP records, ask department heads, check expense reports. Get every vendor contract into one list.
2. Assign owners. One person per contract. Not a team, not a department. A name.
3. Identify the next 90 days. Which contracts have notice deadlines in the next 90 days? Those are your immediate priorities.
4. Get the policy signed. Take the sample policy above to your CFO or Head of Procurement. Adapt it. Get it approved.
5. Set up alerts. Whether you use Renewly, a spreadsheet with calendar reminders, or sticky notes on a wall — make sure someone gets notified before every notice deadline closes.

The RACI tells you who should own what. The policy makes it official. The alerts make it happen. Everything else is refinement.