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A contract moves through a life: it starts, it’s live for a term, it comes up for renewal, and it either continues — larger, smaller, or the same — or it ends. HarborOS doesn’t ask you to tag a contract with its stage and keep that tag up to date. It works the stage out from facts the contract already holds.

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What the lifecycle is read from

Three things on the contract determine where it stands:
  • Its term — the term_start and term_end dates. These define when the contract is live and contributing to your ARR.
  • Its renewal links — a contract can be linked to the contract that replaces it when it renews. This is how HarborOS connects one term to the next instead of treating a renewal as a brand-new, unrelated deal.
  • Its renewal likelihood — your call on what happens at renewal: likely, maybe, at risk, churn, or unset. This is operator judgment, not a system guess.

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How HarborOS reads it

From those three inputs, the rest follows automatically:
  • Active — today falls within the term and the contract isn’t flagged to churn. It counts toward your total ARR.
  • Up for renewal — the term is ending. You set the likelihood and, when the renewal is signed, link it to its successor.
  • New business vs. a renewal — a contract with no predecessor link is new business. One that’s linked back to a prior contract is a renewal.
  • Expansion or contraction — when a renewal’s ARR is higher than the contract it replaced, that’s expansion; lower is contraction. This is what separates gross retention from net retention.
  • Churn — flag a contract’s likelihood as churn and its ARR drops out of your totals. See churn.

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One place it asks you to decide

A contract can’t both be flagged to churn and be linked to a renewal — that’s two opposite claims about the same customer. When that happens, HarborOS treats it as a conflict and holds both sides out of your totals until you resolve it: either remove the renewal link or change the likelihood. The system won’t quietly pick one for you, because the number has to be defensible.

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Why it’s computed, not stored

Because the lifecycle is read from the contract’s own facts, there’s no separate stage field to keep in sync. Change a term date or link a renewal, and every number that depends on it updates with it — the same principle as Contract is the atom, applied across time.