Keeping contract statuses and dates accurate is what makes the rest of Aline work — clean expiration data powers your reports, your reminders, and your renewal planning.
This guide explains how Aline tracks document status, how to capture and reconcile expiration and termination dates, and how to handle evergreen and auto-renewing agreements.
Overview
In this article you'll:
Understand the difference between Draft, Signed, and Expired documents
Capture expiration and termination dates as AI properties
Reconcile contracts that state more than one end date
Mark contracts as expired individually or in bulk
Label evergreen and auto-renewable agreements and give them a real date
Handle contracts with no stated termination date
Understanding Document Status
Every document in Aline sits in one of a few states, found under Documents > All:
Draft — an in-progress agreement that hasn't been executed
Signed — a finalized, executed contract
Expired — an agreement that is past its term and no longer active
Keeping these accurate matters for two reasons: it lets you filter reports down to contracts that are actually live, and it stops reminders from firing on agreements you no longer manage.
Step 1: Capture Expiration and Termination Dates
Use an AI report to extract the key dates from each contract as AI properties — typically Expiration Date, and where relevant Termination Date and Auto-Renewal Provision. Running these across a set of signed contracts gives you a single view of when everything ends.
💡 See Building AI Reports in Aline to set the report up.
Step 2: Reconcile Conflicting Dates
Contracts don't always state a single clean end date. A document may list an expiration date in one clause and a termination or notice date in another. When these conflict:
Review both values side by side in the report
Decide which date governs for your purposes — usually the one that determines when you must act
Update or flag the contract so the governing date is the one your reminders read from
💡 Best Practice: For agreements where the two dates genuinely differ, keep both as separate columns so you can see the full picture, and point reminders at whichever date drives the action you need to take.
Step 3: Mark Contracts as Expired
When a contract has passed its term, mark it Expired so it drops out of your active views. You can do this on an individual document, or in bulk by filtering a report to everything past its expiration date and updating the status across the whole selection at once.
📌 Bulk status updates are especially useful when you're cleaning up a large repository after an initial upload.
Step 4: Label Evergreen and Auto-Renewable Contracts
Evergreen contracts don't expire on a fixed date — they roll over automatically unless someone gives notice. Handle these with labels and a calculated date:
Run an AI prompt to identify agreements with auto-renewal or evergreen language
Apply a label such as Evergreen or Auto-Renewable so they're easy to filter
Capture a calculated next-expiration date (or notice deadline) as its own property, so you have a real date to remind against even though the contract technically never "expires"
Step 5: Handle Contracts With No Termination Date
Some agreements have no stated end date at all. Rather than leaving these blank — which makes them invisible to expiration reports — label them clearly (for example, No Fixed Term) so they're accounted for and reviewed on a schedule you set, instead of being silently ignored.
💡 Best Practices
Keep status current. Expired contracts left as Signed will skew every report and reminder you build.
Keep both dates when they differ rather than overwriting one — then choose which one drives action.
Type your date properties as dates, not text, so you can sort, filter by range, and feed them into reminders.
Never leave an end date blank. Label it (No Fixed Term, Evergreen) so nothing goes missing.
Clean up status in bulk right after a migration, before you run large AI reports.
📚 Related Articles
Setting Up AI Reminders for Contract Expirations & Renewals
❓ Need Help?
Cleaning up status and dates across a newly migrated repository? Click the Support button in Aline — we can help you build the reports that do the bulk updates in one pass.