How to build a contract lifecycle sync

What matters here

• Extract obligations, do not store documents. A notice date inside a PDF is a date nobody will meet.
• Give every obligation an owner and a date. An obligation owned by legal is an obligation nobody performs.
• Surface notice dates before the decision window closes, not on the renewal date.
• Treat the executed version as immutable. An amendment is a new record linked to it, never an edit.
• Report obligations with no owner. That list is where the surprises come from.

Who this is for

You run legal operations or finance systems. Contracts are signed and filed, and what they commit the company to lives in documents nobody reads until something goes wrong.

How it works in practice

What happens between a contract being signed and its obligations being met.

1. 1

   The executed document is captured immutably

   Signed version, parties, dates and signatories, never edited afterwards.

2. 2

   Obligations are extracted as records

   Notice periods, SLAs, price protections, exclusivity, data terms, each with a date.

3. 3

   Every obligation gets an owner

   A named person, not a department, because a department does not remember.

4. 4

   Dates surface where the owner already works

   A calendar entry and a nudge, not a report they would have to open.

5. 5

   Amendments link rather than replace

   So the current position is the chain, and the original is still readable.

6. 6

   The register answers questions without opening a document

   What did we agree, with whom, expiring when.

Paste these into Claude Code or Codex with the Tray Headless plugin installed. Each stage runs on its own. The systems named in them are the worked example rather than a requirement, and every prompt says so.

Once per project, run /tray-workflows:set-workspace to pick the workspace these build in. Point it at a sandbox first.

1. 1

   Begin by capturing the executed version immutably

   The signed document is evidence and it never changes.

   Headless skills build-workflow

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   Use build-workflow. The systems in play are DocuSign, Salesforce and
   Google Drive, or whatever we run in those seats.
   
   On envelope completion, capture: the signed PDF, the certificate of
   completion, the parties, the signatories with their timestamps, and the
   effective and end dates.
   
   Store the executed version write-once. It is never edited, never
   replaced, and never superseded in place. An amendment is a separate
   document linked to it.
   
   Link it to the account and the opportunity so somebody looking at the
   commercial record can reach the contract and vice versa.

2. 2

   Extract obligations as dated records

   A notice date inside a PDF is a date nobody will meet.

   Headless skills build-workflow

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   Use build-workflow. Extract obligations into records instead of leaving
   them in the document:
   
     Term start, end, and whether it auto-renews
     Notice period and therefore the notice deadline, computed
     Price protections or uplift caps, with the percentage and the date
     Service levels committed, with any credit
     Data processing terms, sub-processor rules and residency
     Exclusivity, most favoured nation, or non-solicit
     Termination rights on either side
   
   Each becomes a record with a type, a date, a value and a source link back
   to the clause it came from.
   
   Show every extraction to a person before it is trusted. A model reading a
   contract is a good first pass and a poor final answer, and an obligation
   recorded wrongly is worse than one not recorded.

   The computed notice deadline is the single most valuable field here. Everything else is context around it.

3. 3

   Give every obligation an owner

   An obligation owned by legal is an obligation nobody performs.

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   Assign a named owner per obligation, not a department:
   
     Renewal and notice to the account owner or procurement, depending on
     direction
     Service levels to the delivery owner
     Data terms to the privacy owner
     Payment terms to finance
   
   Resolve owners through the directory and reassign automatically when
   somebody leaves, because an obligation owned by a leaver is an obligation
   with no owner.
   
   Report obligations with no owner as a standing list. That list is where
   the surprises come from, and it is almost never empty on the first
   run.

4. 4

   Surface dates where the owner already works

   A renewal report nobody opens is the same as no report.

   Headless skills tray-gotchas

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   Use tray-gotchas, then surface dates rather than reporting them.
   
   For a notice deadline, alert at 90, 30 and 7 days before the deadline
   itself, not before the renewal date. Those are different dates and the
   gap between them is the entire decision window.
   
   Put it in the owner's calendar as well as messaging them. A calendar entry
   survives a busy fortnight in a way a message does not.
   
   Handle: an auto-renew whose notice window is closing, which should
   escalate rather than nudge; a contract with no end date; an obligation
   whose owner left; and an amendment that changed a date, which must
   recompute everything downstream of it rather than sitting alongside the
   old value.

5. 5

   Make the register answer questions

   So nobody has to open a document to know what was agreed.

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   Build the register so these are queries instead of a legal request:
   
     Which contracts auto-renew in the next two quarters, and their notice
     deadlines
     Which customers have a price protection, and at what level
     Which vendors have access to personal data, and under which terms
     Which contracts have an exclusivity or non-solicit clause
     Total contracted value by expiry quarter
   
   Report: contracts with no obligations extracted, obligations with no
   owner, notice deadlines missed, and auto-renewals that occurred without a
   decision.
   
   That last number should be zero. Every one of them is a contract the
   company renewed by not noticing.

6. 6

   Check it end to end, then hand the obligation types over

   Because what matters in a contract changes with the business.

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   Run the per-step schema checks and the whole-workflow audit before this
   touches production. Test extraction against ten real contracts and have
   legal check every field before any of it is trusted.
   
   Then open the same workflow in Tray Build so legal operations can add
   obligation types, change alert timings and reassign ownership rules in
   the visual canvas.

What it connects to

Contracts are signed in one place and their obligations belong to people in several others.

Named systems are the ones most teams run, not the only ones that work. Each is an authentication in your Tray workspace, referenced by name, so the workflow never holds a credential. Where we have a connector page, the name links to it.

Questions people ask

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