Contract Lifecycle covers the agreement end to end. Authoring begins from approved templates, so a new contract is assembled rather than written from a blank page, with metadata such as counterparty, value, term and governing law captured as structured fields from the outset. A governed clause library supplies pre-approved language for liability, indemnity, payment terms, data protection and termination, each clause carrying its own approval status and usage rules so drafters cannot silently introduce unvetted wording.

From there the module runs negotiation and redlining, multi-party review, structured approval, electronic execution and post-signature management in one continuous record. It tracks obligations and milestones, manages renewals, expiries and notice periods, and preserves a complete revision history of every version, comment and change. Deviation from standard terms is flagged, measured against policy and routed for the right level of sign-off. The result is a live register of the organisation's commercial commitments that is always current, always attributable and always ready for audit.

At the heart of the module is the agreement itself: the binding relationship between the organisation and a counterparty, expressed through a specific version of text and a defined commercial and legal position. Each agreement belongs to a category, buy-side or sell-side, and carries the essential commercial parameters that let finance and operations act on it without reading the full document.

An agreement is built from clauses drawn from the governed library. A clause is a reusable unit of meaning, not merely a paragraph: it has an owner, an approval state and a fallback position for negotiation, so the language a business is willing to accept is itself a managed asset. Once signed, an agreement gives rise to obligations: the concrete, dated commitments each party must perform, such as delivering a report, paying an invoice, maintaining insurance or serving notice before renewal. Obligations are what make a contract operationally real, and the module tracks their status independently of the document.

Surrounding these are the counterparty, who may appear across many agreements, and the revision history, which records every draft, redline and approval as an immutable sequence. Because obligations, clauses and versions all hang off the agreement, the module can answer not only what was signed, but why a term reads as it does and what the business must still do about it.

A contract enters the module through intake, where a requester selects a template and the type of agreement and supplies the commercial parameters. The draft is assembled from the clause library and enters negotiation, where internal and counterparty edits are captured as tracked redlines against a controlled base version. Reviewers comment in context, propose fallback clauses and resolve points of difference without losing the thread of who changed what.

When the text stabilises, the contract moves into approval. Routing is driven by the shape of the deal: value thresholds, risk category, non-standard clauses and margin all determine which approvers are engaged and in what order. Approvers see exactly what deviates from standard and why. On approval the agreement proceeds to execution by electronic signature, and the signed instrument is filed as the authoritative version.

Post-signature, the module runs the long tail of the relationship. Obligations and milestones are monitored against their due dates, renewal and expiry clocks are watched against notice periods, and variations, amendments and terminations are handled as governed events that extend the same continuous record rather than starting a new one.

The module treats a contract as a controlled financial and legal object. Every material action, a redline accepted, a clause substituted, an approval granted, a signature applied, is written to an immutable audit trail with actor, timestamp and prior state, giving a defensible account of how the agreement reached its final form. Segregation of duties is enforced so that the person who drafts a deviation cannot also approve it, and approval authority is bound to delegated limits by value and risk.

Clause governance is where legal control is exercised: the library distinguishes standard, fallback and non-standard language, so any departure from the organisation's preferred position is measured, quantified and escalated rather than negotiated invisibly. Notice periods, auto-renewal triggers and expiry dates are calculated from the executed terms, protecting the business from unwanted evergreen commitments and missed windows.

On the commercial side, the module holds the billing terms, pricing schedules, indexation and milestone triggers that drive revenue and cost, providing the contractual basis for revenue recognition and for accurate accrual of purchase obligations. Retention of the signed record and its full history supports statutory record-keeping, data protection obligations and the evidentiary needs of any dispute or audit.

Contract Lifecycle is deliberately not a silo. It stores and versions every document through Document Management, so drafts, executed originals and supporting attachments live in the suite's controlled repository with consistent access control and retention. Execution runs through Electronic Signatures, which applies legally valid signatures, captures the audit certificate and returns the completed instrument straight into the record.

Approval routing is orchestrated by Flow Management, so the value thresholds, risk gates and parallel or sequential sign-off paths that govern a contract are configured, versioned and monitored alongside every other approval process in the organisation. Once an agreement is live, its commercial terms flow into Accounting and Control, where contract-driven billing raises invoices on the agreed schedule, applies indexation and milestone triggers, and books the receivable or payable, so the gap between what was signed and what is billed disappears.

Because counterparties, obligations and values are structured data rather than text buried in a file, other modules across the suite can read the contractual position directly, giving procurement, sales and finance a shared and current view of what the organisation is committed to and entitled to.

Nashua 360 treats AI Workers as first-class participants, and in this module they operate across the whole lifecycle. Users query contract data conversationally, asking which agreements auto-renew next quarter, where a particular indemnity cap appears or what a counterparty's total committed spend is, and receive answers drawn from the live record. Workers execute actions on request: assembling a draft from templates, inserting fallback clauses, scheduling renewal reminders or advancing a contract through its next workflow step.

On ingestion of a third-party paper, an AI Worker extracts parties, term, value, payment terms and key obligations, and reconciles the incoming language against the clause library, highlighting where it diverges from standard and quantifying the risk. Throughout the post-signature life of an agreement, Workers watch for anomalies and exceptions: obligations approaching breach, missed milestones, unusual value changes or notice windows about to close, and raise them to the right owner.

Workers also provide decision support, summarising a redline set, recommending a fallback position or flagging a clause that conflicts with policy. Where governance calls for it, an AI Worker acts as a formal review or approval node in a Flow Management path, screening a contract against defined criteria and either clearing it or escalating to a human, with its judgement recorded in the same audit trail as any other approver.