SharePoint for Contract Management: When Document Storage Isn’t Enough
October 25 2025The SharePoint Starting Point
If your business uses Microsoft 365, there’s a good chance you’re storing contracts in SharePoint. It makes sense—SharePoint is already part of your subscription, your team knows how to use it, and it provides a centralised location for documents. For many Australian businesses, SharePoint becomes the default choice for contract management simply because it’s there.
And for basic contract storage, SharePoint does the job. You can create folder structures, upload signed agreements, set permissions, and ensure your contracts aren’t scattered across email inboxes and personal drives. If you’re managing a handful of contracts and your primary concern is keeping them organised and accessible, SharePoint might be sufficient.
But here’s the challenge: contract management isn’t just about storage. As your business grows and your contract portfolio expands, the limitations of using SharePoint for contract management become increasingly apparent—and increasingly costly.
What SharePoint Does Well
Before exploring the limitations, it’s worth acknowledging SharePoint’s strengths as a document management platform:
Centralised Storage: SharePoint provides a single repository where authorised team members can access contracts from anywhere, eliminating the chaos of documents scattered across individual computers and email threads.
Version Control: SharePoint tracks document versions, allowing you to see the history of changes and revert to previous versions if needed. This is valuable during contract negotiations when multiple drafts circulate.
Access Controls: You can set permissions at the site, library, or folder level, ensuring sensitive contracts are only visible to appropriate personnel. For Australian businesses managing confidential supplier agreements or employment contracts, this security is essential.
Microsoft Ecosystem Integration: SharePoint integrates seamlessly with other Microsoft tools your team already uses—Word for editing, Outlook for sharing, Teams for collaboration. This familiarity reduces the learning curve.
Collaboration Features: Multiple people can access and comment on documents, making it easier for legal, procurement, and business teams to work together during contract development.
For small businesses with limited contract volumes and straightforward requirements, these features might be entirely adequate. SharePoint provides a significant improvement over the alternative of physical filing cabinets or unstructured network drives.
Where SharePoint Falls Short for Contract Management
The problems emerge when you need to actually manage contracts throughout their lifecycle, not just store them. SharePoint was built as a document management and collaboration platform—not as a contract lifecycle management solution. Here’s where the gaps become problematic:
No Automated Obligation Tracking
Contracts contain obligations—deliverables, payment schedules, service level agreements, performance milestones. These obligations require active management throughout the contract term. SharePoint stores the document, but it doesn’t extract, track, or alert you about these commitments.
In practice, this means contract managers must manually read through contracts, extract obligations into spreadsheets, and create their own tracking systems. For Australian businesses managing dozens or hundreds of supplier contracts, this manual process is time-consuming and error-prone.
Limited Renewal and Expiry Management
Missing a renewal date can have serious consequences—automatic renewals on unfavourable terms, service interruptions, or compliance breaches. While you can theoretically set up Power Automate flows to send renewal reminders, this requires technical configuration and doesn’t scale well.
SharePoint doesn’t natively understand contract dates. You can add metadata fields for expiry dates, but there’s no built-in system to monitor these dates across your entire contract portfolio and provide meaningful alerts well in advance of critical deadlines.
Weak Search and Retrieval Capabilities
Finding specific information within contracts stored in SharePoint is frustratingly difficult. Yes, you can search for file names and basic metadata, but SharePoint doesn’t enable searching based on values within the contracts themselves.
Need to find all contracts with a specific supplier? All agreements containing particular liability clauses? All contracts with values above a certain threshold? Without proper metadata tagging (which requires manual effort for every contract), this becomes a manual exercise of opening and reading multiple documents.
No Compliance Automation
Australian businesses face complex compliance requirements—Australian Consumer Law, Privacy Act obligations, Fair Work legislation, industry-specific regulations. Managing compliance across a contract portfolio requires proactive tracking and regular reviews.
SharePoint provides no automated compliance checking. There’s no system to flag contracts that may contain unfair terms under Australian Consumer Law, no automated alerts when regulatory changes affect your agreements, and no mechanism to ensure new contracts meet current compliance standards before execution.
Generic Workflow Capabilities
Power Automate can route documents through basic approval processes, but creating sophisticated, multi-stage approval workflows for different contract types and value thresholds requires significant technical expertise and ongoing maintenance.
More importantly, these workflows are generic document workflows—they don’t understand the specific requirements of contract approvals, such as routing to legal for risk assessment, financial approval based on contract value, or procurement sign-off for supplier agreements.
Lack of Contract Analytics
Understanding the performance of your contract portfolio requires data. Which contracts are delivering value? Where are renewal opportunities? Which suppliers consistently underperform? What’s your total contractual spend by category?
SharePoint doesn’t capture or report on contract data. If you want insights, you’ll need to manually analyse individual contracts and build your own reporting systems—typically in spreadsheets that quickly become outdated and disconnected from the source documents.
No Template Management or Contract Assembly
Creating new contracts in SharePoint means opening an existing document, saving a copy, and manually editing it. There’s no template library with approved clauses, no guidance on which terms to use, and no protection against outdated or risky language creeping into new agreements.
For Australian businesses where contracts must include specific provisions—GST clauses, Australian Consumer Law protections, appropriate jurisdiction clauses—this lack of template governance creates compliance risks.
When Businesses Outgrow SharePoint
The tipping point varies, but most Australian businesses recognise they’ve outgrown SharePoint for contract management when they experience:
- Missed renewal dates resulting in unfavourable automatic renewals or service interruptions
- Hours spent manually tracking contract obligations across spreadsheets
- Compliance concerns about whether contracts meet current Australian regulatory requirements
- Difficulty answering basic questions about their contract portfolio without extensive manual research
- Approval processes that create bottlenecks and slow business operations
- Lost revenue opportunities because contract performance and renewal timing aren’t actively managed
If these challenges sound familiar, you’re not alone. Many Australian organisations start with SharePoint and eventually recognise they need something purpose-built for contract lifecycle management.
The Purpose-Built Alternative
This is where dedicated contract management systems like WebCM make the difference. Unlike general-purpose document management platforms, purpose-built contract management solutions are designed specifically for the complete contract lifecycle.
WebCM provides everything SharePoint offers for document storage—centralised repositories, version control, access controls—but adds the critical capabilities that SharePoint lacks:
Automated Obligation Tracking: The system extracts and monitors contract obligations, automatically alerting responsible parties as deadlines approach.
Proactive Renewal Management: Automated reminders provide advance notice of approaching renewal dates, giving you time to review relationships, renegotiate terms, or arrange alternatives.
Intelligent Search: Find contracts based on suppliers, values, terms, dates, or any other criteria without manual document review.
Compliance Automation: Built-in compliance features help ensure contracts meet Australian regulatory requirements and flag agreements that need attention when regulations change.
Purpose-Built Workflows: Approval processes designed specifically for contracts, with routing based on contract type, value, and risk assessment.
Contract Analytics: Real-time dashboards and reports provide visibility into contract performance, spending patterns, and risk exposure.
Template Libraries: Managed template libraries ensure new contracts use approved, compliant language appropriate for Australian business context.
For Australian businesses, WebCM offers another critical advantage—it’s designed specifically for the Australian market with local support, Australian compliance features, and understanding of local business practices. You’re not adapting a global platform to Australian requirements; you’re using a solution built for them.
Making the Transition
If you’re currently using SharePoint for contract management and recognising its limitations, transitioning to a purpose-built solution is more straightforward than you might expect. Your existing contracts can be migrated into WebCM, and the system can work alongside your Microsoft 365 environment rather than replacing it entirely.
Most importantly, the time savings and risk reduction become apparent quickly. Contract managers report spending significantly less time on administrative tasks and more time on strategic work—negotiating better terms, improving supplier relationships, and identifying cost savings.
The Bottom Line
SharePoint serves a valuable purpose as a document management platform, and for businesses with minimal contract management needs, it may be sufficient. But contract management extends far beyond document storage. As your business grows and your contract portfolio becomes more complex, the limitations of using SharePoint for contract management create real risks and inefficiencies.
The question isn’t whether SharePoint is a bad tool—it’s whether it’s the right tool for contract lifecycle management. For most Australian businesses managing significant contract portfolios, the answer is increasingly clear: document storage is important, but it’s not enough.
A robust contract management system streamlines these challenges by automating deadline tracking, centralising document storage, and providing clear visibility into contract performance. WebCM offers a contract management system designed specifically for Australian businesses, helping contract managers stay organised, meet deadlines, and focus on strategic work rather than administrative tasks.
Ready to see how the right contract management system can improve your effectiveness? Request a free 90 day demo today!