The Contract Management Context
A Geneva real estate management company administering a portfolio of 450 buildings on behalf of institutional owners had to manage over 800 active contracts: commercial and residential leases, maintenance contracts (elevators, heating, cleaning), insurance, energy supply contracts, management mandates, and agreements with public authorities. These contracts were scattered across network folders with inconsistent naming, making quick document searches difficult.
The real problem lay in deadline tracking. Each contract has critical dates: commitment period end, termination deadlines, renewals, price indexations, periodic reviews. These deadlines were previously tracked in an Excel file manually maintained by one staff member—a fragile system prone to errors. Several times per year, a deadline was missed, resulting either in an unwanted automatic renewal or the inability to terminate an unfavorable contract, with financial consequences potentially reaching tens of thousands of francs.
Management sought a centralized, automated, and reliable solution to store, classify, and monitor all contracts, eliminating the risk of missed deadlines.
The Developed Solution
We designed a complete contract management system based on SharePoint Framework, with a custom SPFx application offering a modern user experience and Power Automate automations for alerts and tracking.
The system's core is a SharePoint document library structured around rich metadata. Each stored contract is enriched with over 20 metadata fields: contract type (lease, maintenance, insurance, etc.), contracting parties, concerned building, start date, initial duration, deadline date, termination notice period, renewal terms (automatic or not), annual amount, indexation (yes/no), tracking manager, and status (active, terminated, in negotiation). This metadata enables powerful search and automatic classification.
To facilitate metadata entry, we developed a modern SharePoint Framework application integrating into the SharePoint interface as a WebPart on the library's home page. This application offers an intelligent contract deposit form guiding the user through mandatory fields with real-time validation. For example, if the user selects "commercial lease", the form automatically displays specific fields like "annual rent base 100" and "reference index", absent for other contract types.
The SPFx application also includes an intelligent contract recognition system. When a user deposits a new PDF document, the application automatically extracts text via Azure Document Intelligence and uses regular expressions and search patterns to identify key information: contract date (searching typical patterns like "Done in Geneva, [date]"), parties ("between [party A] and [party B]"), duration ("for a duration of X years"), and deadlines ("cancellable with notice of X months"). This information pre-fills the form, with the user only needing to verify and complete.
A dashboard view developed in React is displayed on the home page and presents several visual indicators: contracts expiring within 90 days (orange zone), contracts requiring urgent action (red zone for deadlines under 30 days), contract distribution by type and manager, and total value of contractual commitments. Interactive charts enable quick information filtering.
The automatic alert system relies on Power Automate. A flow triggers daily and analyzes all active contracts to identify those approaching a critical date. Three types of alerts are generated according to urgency. The preventive alert (90 days before deadline) sends an information email to the tracking manager reminding them that a decision will soon need to be made regarding renewal or termination. The important alert (45 days before) generates a Planner task assigned to the manager and copies the administrative director. Finally, the critical alert (30 days before with termination deadline passed) creates an immediate Teams notification and a high-priority email to the entire management team.
For contracts with automatic renewal, the system automatically calculates the termination deadline based on the expiry date and notice period, displaying this information prominently. A visual flag signals contracts where the termination window is open.
A history and versioning feature ensures complete traceability. When a contract is renewed, a new version is created with a link to the old one, and the old version's status changes to "replaced". Metadata modification history is preserved, enabling tracking of who did what and when.
Operational Benefits
After fourteen months of use, the system transformed the company's contract management. No critical deadline has been missed since deployment, whereas this happened four to five times per year previously. This reliability avoided several tens of thousands of francs in penalties and unwanted renewals.
Contract search time was divided by 10, going from several minutes navigating the network tree to a few seconds of metadata search in SharePoint. Staff can instantly retrieve all contracts related to a specific building, a particular supplier, or expiring within a given period.
Administrative workload decreased 40%. The old manual Excel tracking file management mobilized about 15 hours per month for updating, checking, and alerts. This time is now reduced to 4 hours devoted only to substantive actions (negotiations, renewal decisions) rather than mechanical tracking.
Contract negotiation quality improved. Being alerted sufficiently early, managers have the time needed to analyze alternatives, consult several suppliers, and negotiate in good conditions rather than urgently. Several contracts were renegotiated with substantial savings ranging from 5% to 20% depending on cases.
Management has complete visibility on the company's contractual commitments. The dashboard enables quick identification of risk concentrations (excessive dependence on one supplier, grouped renewals creating a workload peak), facilitating strategic decisions.
Compliance and Audit
The system considerably strengthens regulatory compliance. Real estate contracts are subject to numerous legal obligations in Switzerland, particularly concerning rent indexations and termination deadlines. The system guarantees these obligations are met by automating reminders.
During the last fiduciary audit, auditors congratulated the company on its document management system quality. Complete action traceability, automatic timestamping, and version history greatly facilitated verifications. Document audit time was reduced 30%, generating savings on fees.
Technical Architecture and Scalability
The SharePoint Framework application is developed in TypeScript with React for the user interface. It consumes SharePoint REST APIs to read and write metadata, and the Azure Document Intelligence API for text extraction. Code is organized in reusable components facilitating maintenance and evolution.
The application is deployed in the company's Microsoft 365 tenant app catalog, ensuring total control of versions and permissions. Updates are tested in a pre-production environment before production deployment, following DevOps best practices.
The system is designed to scale. Currently 800 contracts, it can handle several thousand documents without problem thanks to SharePoint's native indexing. Search performance remains excellent even with significant volume.
Monthly operating cost including Azure resources for Document Intelligence, Power Automate Premium for advanced flows, and houle support represents approximately 250 CHF. Savings in administrative time (11 hours per month) and avoided risks (estimated at least 20,000 CHF annually) generate very largely positive ROI.
Future Evolutions
The company plans several improvements. Integration with the accounting system would enable automatic commitment entries upon signing a new contract. An integrated electronic signature module would avoid paper document back-and-forths. Finally, predictive analysis could suggest the best time to renegotiate certain contracts based on market trends.
Conclusion
This contract management system demonstrates SharePoint Framework's power when used to create custom business applications. By combining a modern user interface with structured metadata and intelligent automations, we transformed a risky process into a reliable and efficient system. The real estate company now has total mastery of its contractual commitments, eliminating oversight risks while gaining in productivity and negotiation quality.