An honest migration walkthrough: from a spreadsheet to a checked register

A spreadsheet is not a mistake. It may contain years of useful context: counterparties, owners, renewal notes, links, and the informal rules your team actually uses. A migration should preserve that meaning instead of treating the sheet as a pile of cells to ingest.

In the Phase 1 plan, Agreedio imports one PDF at a time. Batch import is planned work, not an available promise. That constraint is useful for the first pass because it forces a checked source behind each monitored date.

Start by naming what each spreadsheet column means. A column called renewal might hold a term end, a latest notice date, a reminder date, or a note that nobody has checked. Those should not collapse into one product field.

The free template at /resources/contract-management-excel-template uses columns that can later map to a register: counterparty, relationship, agreement, owner, term end, notice wording, source link, review state and amendments. The point is meaning, not a particular file format.

Do not begin with the neatest row. Begin with the agreements that can cost attention soon. In the sample register, the Alder Works retainer has a confirmed latest notice date of 2 July 2027 and a 60-day internal reminder on 3 May 2027. Fernhill Cloud and Larkspur Payroll also have upcoming actions.

This does not make those sample vendors real. They are fictional rows used to show sequencing. The operational point is simple: migrate the rows where an owner needs to make or record a decision before migrating rows that are already quiet.

When SOW-S1 is imported, the product can suggest an effective start, term end, monthly fee and 60-day notice wording from the source. The plan's rule is that those suggestions do not start monitoring. A person must confirm the source-backed fields, date rule and owner.

This is especially important when a spreadsheet already has a date. A copied date can be useful evidence of past work, but it is not the same as a confirmed rule against SOW-S1 or Amendment A1. Manual entry remains available, but it should be labelled as manual rather than AI-verified.

Not every row deserves immediate migration. The Ines Baró contractor agreement in the sample is manual and ends on 31 March 2027. If the source is elsewhere and no future monitoring is needed, a spreadsheet row plus an export may be enough for now.

Keep spreadsheet-only rows when they are historical, source-free, outside the supported format, or part of a workflow Agreedio does not handle. Grants, funder reporting, procurement and accounting should not be disguised as agreement tracking just because they appear in the same workbook.

The Phase 2 plan includes batch or CSV import with mapping, duplicate review, resumable failures and provenance. It should preserve column meanings and show failed rows. It should not silently confirm date interpretations or turn every uploaded file into an active monitored agreement.

Until that exists, the honest migration path is narrower: one PDF, one checked record, one owner, one confirmed or unresolved date rule. That is slower than a bulk upload and safer than pretending a bulk upload completed the review.

This walkthrough does not cover bulk migration as an available feature, data cleansing for every spreadsheet shape, legal interpretation, procurement, grant management or accounting. It explains how to preserve meaning and review state in the fictional sample before broader import tooling exists.