Renewals in Excel are surprise churn
Tuesday morning, the cancellation is in the inbox. A customer, 40,000 euros in annual contract value, four years on the books. Everyone in sales is genuinely surprised, the CEO asks how this could happen, the account manager says the customer never even complained. Then somebody checks: the renewal had been due for 90 days. There was no task, no meeting, no conversation. There was one row in an Excel list, tab “Contracts 2026”, last modified in February.
That’s not an outlier, that’s the default state. Renewals live in a spreadsheet one person maintains when she remembers to. Next to the contract end column sits a date that never got updated after the last upsell. Whether anyone picks up the phone 90 days out depends on whether that one person happens to have the list open. That’s not a process. That’s hope with cell references.
And yet the mechanics are laughably simple. Three things belong in the system: the renewal date as a required field on the contract or the opportunity, an owner attached by name, and a playbook that kicks off automatically. Health check at 120 days out, conversation at 90, proposal at 60, escalation to the sales lead on radio silence. No human has to remember, the system remembers. That’s exactly what it was built for.
And you don’t have to buy anything for it. Salesforce does it with flows and renewal opportunities, HubSpot with deal pipelines and workflows, any CS tool obviously. The functionality sits in the license you’ve been paying for for years, unused. The build is a few days of configuration, no rocket science, no project with a steering committee.
So why does the Excel exist everywhere anyway? Because it was never a solution, it was a symptom. It appears when the contract data in the CRM is missing or wrong, when nobody is responsible for existing customers, when renewal is treated as admin work instead of revenue. The spreadsheet is the visible proof that the process is missing. You can hear it in the language too: companies with a process talk about net revenue retention. Companies with Excel talk about the customer who surprisingly canceled last week.
Do the quick math: at 2 million in recurring revenue, every percentage point of avoidable churn costs 20,000 euros. Every year. How many rows does your list have?
