Effective end date

The effective end date is the date a contract genuinely stops, once you have given notice not to renew. For an auto-renewing contract that you cancel in time, it is usually the end of the current paid term.

Distinguishing it from the renewal date matters for budgeting and offboarding: you keep access, and keep paying, up to the effective end date, not the day you send the cancellation.

An annual contract renews on 1 April and the notice period is 60 days, so the cancellation deadline falls at the end of January. Serve notice on 20 January, comfortably inside it, and the contract still does not stop on 20 January. It runs to its renewal date of 1 April and stops there, instead of rolling into another year. The seats keep working until then, the invoice for the current year is still owed in full, and offboarding has until April rather than January.

Miss that deadline and the same contract renews. The date the cost actually stops moves out a whole year, to 1 April the following year, and so does everything budgeted against it. That is why the effective end date, and not the date the notice was sent, is the figure that belongs in a leaver plan or a spend forecast.

One date drives the whole lifecycle, and the register works it out rather than asking you to maintain it. For a tool that auto-renews, the stored renewal date is rolled forward to the next occurrence on or after today, so a renewal that has already gone past does not quietly drop out of the register, the reminders or the reports.

A tool with auto-renew switched off is treated differently on purpose: its renewal date is left exactly where it is, so a date in the past reads as overdue instead of being rolled into next year and presented as healthy. The Renewal column (and the optional Expiry in column) read this same date, so what the register sorts on is always the date the contract actually runs to.