Keeping a register
Building a vendor register
A vendor register is best built from memory first and documents second. Listing the vendors people know about takes an afternoon and immediately shows the shape of the portfolio. Chasing every contract before recording anything takes months and usually stalls. Start with names, owners, and what each vendor does, then let the paperwork fill in behind it.
The Vendor Squeezer team. Last reviewed 2026-08-08. General guidance on contract structures, not legal advice, and not a statement about any particular vendor's terms.
Start with names, not documents
The instinct is to begin by collecting contracts, because contracts are the authoritative source. In practice that stalls, because the contracts are held by different people in different places and some of them do not exist as documents at all.
Listing vendors from memory produces something useful on the first day: a portfolio you can react to. People look at it and say what is missing, which is a far better discovery mechanism than asking them to remember unprompted.
- Every vendor anyone in the team can name.
- What each one is used for, in one line.
- Who owns the relationship, as a named person.
- Whether a contract is believed to exist, and roughly where.
Where the rest of the list hides
The memory pass will miss things in predictable places, and each is a specific search rather than a general appeal for information.
- Recurring card charges, which is where small self-serve subscriptions live.
- Expense claims, where individually purchased tools appear.
- The single sign-on application list, which shows tools in active use.
- Recurring invoices in accounts payable for the past year.
- Anything a departing colleague owned, which is where orphaned relationships collect.
Attach documents as they surface, not before
Once a vendor exists as a record, the contract has somewhere to go. That sequencing matters: a document with no record is filed and forgotten, while a record with a missing document is a visible gap someone can close.
Ask for the commitment document rather than the agreement in general. The order form or statement of work answers the commercial questions, and it is usually shorter and easier for someone to find.
Keep the gaps visible
A register decays through plausible-looking completeness. Blank cells get filled with estimates, estimates stop being labelled, and within a year nobody can tell which figures came from a document. Keeping unknowns marked as unknown is what makes the register usable as evidence rather than as a rough guide.
The other decay is staleness. A record confirmed two years ago and never revisited looks identical to one confirmed last week. Recording when each record was last confirmed costs one field and is the difference between a register and an archive.
Questions to ask about your own agreement
- 1.Which vendors can the team name without looking anything up?
- 2.What recurring charges exist that nobody has claimed?
- 3.Who owns each relationship, by name?
- 4.Which records have a believed contract that nobody has produced?
- 5.When was each record last confirmed by a person?
Common questions
How complete does a register need to be to be useful?
Less complete than people expect. A list of vendors with owners and renewal dates answers most of the questions a budget owner is asked, and it does so long before every contract has been collected.
Should small subscriptions be included?
Yes. They are individually small, collectively significant, and the least likely to be reviewed by anyone. They also renew automatically, which makes them the spend most likely to continue after the need for it has gone.
Put this against your own vendors
Record the term, the notice deadline, and the exit cost against the vendor once, and the next renewal review starts from an answer instead of a search. Free while in early access.