How to Set Up Expiry Reminders in Trackords

This is the practical walkthrough for getting Trackords doing useful work in under half an hour: creating an account, deciding on record types, adding your first record, setting the three reminders and the expiry alert, choosing who receives the emails, importing an existing spreadsheet, and reading the dashboard. It assumes nothing beyond a list of things with dates on them.

1. Create your account

Go to /register and sign up with your work email. Trackords is free and there is no credit card to enter and no trial period that ends. You will receive a verification email; click the link and log in. The account you create is the workspace — the people you invite later share its records and receive its reminders.

If you would rather look around first, open the live demo and log in as demo / demo. It is a working workspace with sample records across several types; you can click through everything described below without creating anything.

2. Decide on record types

A record type is a category of thing you track — Subscription, Visa, Contract, Insurance policy, Domain, Vehicle registration — with its own set of fields. Trackords offers starter types you can use as they are, and you can create your own types with custom fields for whatever your records need: a policy number, a vendor, a cost, a notice period, an owner’s name, a Hijri date.

Two pieces of advice from people who have set this up before:

• Fewer types, more fields. One “Licence” type with a “Category” field is easier to manage than six licence types. Split a type only when the fields genuinely differ.
• Add fields for the questions you will ask later. “Who owns this?” and “How much does it cost?” are the two most common. A field you add later is available on every record of that type, and older records simply have it blank until filled.

3. Add a record

Create a new record, pick its type, give it a name people will recognise in an email subject line (“Adobe Creative Cloud – 12 seats” rather than “Adobe”), and enter the expiry date. Fill in the custom fields, add any comments, and attach the supporting files: the contract, the policy schedule, a scan of the document. Attachments live with the record, so when the reminder arrives the paperwork is one click away rather than in someone’s inbox.

The expiry date is the anchor for everything else. For contracts with a notice period, consider using the last day to give notice as the expiry date and recording the actual term end in a custom field; our guide to auto-renewal notice periods explains why.

4. Configure the three reminders

Each record can have up to three reminders. Each one is either:

• A number of days before expiry — for example 60, 30 and 7. These follow the expiry date automatically: when you renew and update the date next year, the reminders move with it.
• A fixed date — for example 1 December, because that is when the budget meeting happens, or the day a notice window opens. Fixed dates stay put regardless of the expiry date.

You can mix the two on one record. A sensible default for most records is a long, a medium and a short interval, chosen to match how long the renewal takes:

Reminders are sent by email on the day they fall due, and each one is sent once per record for a given expiry date, so you will not receive the same reminder twice.

5. The expiry alert, the extra address and who receives emails

Two optional settings sit alongside the reminders:

• Alert on expiry. Switch this on to receive an email on the expiry date itself. It is the backstop for when the earlier reminders were seen but not acted on, and it is useful for records where the day of expiry triggers a task — updating a certificate held by a client, say.
• Extra email address. Each record can carry one additional address that receives its reminders alongside the workspace users. Use it for the person outside your team who needs to know: the employee whose permit it is, the broker, the department head who approves the renewal, or a shared mailbox.

Reminder emails go to every active user of the workspace, plus the extra address on the record if one is set. Users are invited by an admin and given one of three roles:

• Admin — everything, including users, types and fields.
• Editor — can add and change records, reminders and attachments.
• Viewer — can see records but not change them.

Because every active user receives every reminder, think about who should be a user and who should be an extra address. A workspace of three people in finance and operations is typical; a line manager who only needs to see their team’s dates can be a viewer. The audit log records who created or changed each record and when, which answers the “who moved this date?” question without a meeting.

6. Import a CSV

If your records already live in a spreadsheet, export it as CSV and import it rather than typing. Prepare the file first:

1. One row per record; a header row with column names.
2. A column for the record name and one for the expiry date, in a consistent date format.
3. One column per custom field you want populated, with the same values you would type by hand.
4. Remove rows for things that have already expired and are not being renewed; they will only add noise.

Import into the matching record type, check a handful of records afterwards, then review the reminders. CSV export works in the other direction and is the easiest way to produce a report for a monthly meeting or to hand the list to an auditor. If you are weighing up whether to keep the spreadsheet instead, the comparison page on this site is honest about the trade-offs.

7. Read the dashboard

The dashboard groups records by how close they are to expiry, using four colours:

A useful weekly habit is a two-minute glance at the dashboard: red should be empty or explained, orange should have names against it, and the yellow band is next month’s work. If a record stays red because it has genuinely been renewed, update its expiry date and it moves back to blue, taking its reminders with it.

How Trackords helps

Everything above is free to use: your own record types and custom fields, three reminders per record plus the expiry alert and the extra address, emails to every active user, attachments, CSV import and export, the audit log, and admin, editor and viewer roles. There is no credit card to enter. The features page lists it all in one place, and the FAQ covers the common questions.

If you have not yet chosen what to track first, the other guides in this section are a good starting point — the SaaS subscription audit checklist is the quickest win for most small businesses.