Every agency that looks after its clients’ services eventually notices one thing: the work isn’t renewing. Renewing is easy, and often it happens on its own. The work is getting back the money you’ve already put in.
The provider charges on the expiry date, using the card you left on file. The client pays when the invoice reaches them, or after a reminder, or two months later. In between there is you, out of pocket. On a twelve-euro domain you don’t even notice. On hosting, on an annual maintenance contract, multiplied across the whole client base, it becomes a figure worth knowing.
This guide lays out the full renewal cycle from the point of view of whoever collects the money rather than whoever absorbs the cost: what to do before the deadline, what to do on the day, what to do when the client goes quiet, and how to work out at year end what you actually earned.
A renewal has three moments, not one
Most people picture a renewal as a single event: the deadline arrives, you pay, done. In practice there are three distinct moments, happening at different times, and almost always handled by different people or different tools — when they are handled at all.
The first is notifying: telling the client that something of theirs is about to expire, before it expires, and telling them what it costs. The second is collecting: getting the money in, ideally before you have to pay the provider yourself. The third is measuring: knowing, once the renewal is done, what you kept between what came in and what went out.
Handle only the first and you have a reminder. Handle the first two and you have a process. Handle all three and you know whether the service you’re reselling is worth reselling. Most agencies, in our experience, stop halfway through the first.
The provider’s reminder reaches you, not your client
This is the point that causes the most confusion, and it’s worth being explicit about. The registrar, the host, the mailbox provider: they all notify the contract holder. If the contract is in your name — and for services you resell it almost always is — those emails land in your inbox, not the client’s.
That means two things. First, you already have plenty of reminders: remembering isn’t the hard part. Second, and more awkwardly, the client has no idea anything is about to expire. They won’t know until you tell them. And if you tell them after the deadline, you’ve paid on their behalf for something they hadn’t yet approved.
Everything else follows from this: notifying the client isn’t a courtesy, it’s the first act of collection. If it goes out late, or never goes out, you’re the one financing the renewal.
How far ahead should you notify, and what do you write?
The useful lead time isn’t the one that suits you, it’s the one the client needs in order to decide and pay. In our experience a first notice forty to sixty days out works well for annual services: there’s room for the client to think, to ask, and above all for the payment to land before the date you go out of pocket.
Content matters more than timing. A notice that only says “your domain expires on 12 November” produces exactly one response: “ok”. A notice that says what expires, what it costs, what happens if it isn’t renewed and how to pay produces a payment. The gap between the two is the gap between a reminder and a request.
A second notice is worth sending, and it needs to read differently from the first. Not more insistent: more concrete. If the first explained, the second sets a date and a consequence. We covered how to set up the two levels in detail when writing about notifications and emails.
Why should you collect before paying the provider?
There’s an enormous, almost invisible difference between two sequences that look identical on paper. In the first you renew, then invoice, then collect. In the second you notify, collect, then renew. The service delivered is the same; your cash position is not.
The second sequence is available more often than it seems, because most services have a renewal window that opens weeks or months before expiry. The real constraint isn’t technical — it’s that it requires having notified in good time, which brings us back to the previous point. Notify close to the deadline and you have no choice: you front the money.
It won’t work for every client or every service, and that’s worth saying: on some you’ll keep fronting the money, which is fine as long as you know which ones and how much. Fronting isn’t the problem. Fronting without knowing it, across the whole client base, all year, is. We wrote about that separately: how much you’re fronting for your clients without realising.
Measuring: what you actually keep on each service
The third moment is the first to be dropped, because nothing forces it. Nobody emails you on 31 December to remind you to work out what you earned on the year’s renewals.
And yet it’s the only one of the three that lets you decide anything. Without per-service margin you don’t know whether reselling that hosting still makes sense, you don’t know whose price you can adjust, you don’t know which clients cost you more than they bring in. All you know is that money comes in and money goes out.
The arithmetic is trivial on one line and awkward on a hundred, particularly when one cost covers several clients — a shared server, a multi-site licence, an antispam bundle. There, per-client margin only exists if you’ve decided how to split that cost, and if you decided it once rather than from memory every time.
What do you do when the client doesn’t pay?
It happens eventually, and the practical question isn’t whether to chase but what gets switched off, and when. Instinct misleads here: people think about the domain, because it’s the scariest thing, and it’s the one that matters least in money terms.
The technical margins are worth knowing. An .it domain can be renewed with no surcharge for fifteen days past expiry; in the following thirty, restoring it costs roughly twelve euros on top of the renewal. On a .com restoration runs past sixty euros, with real variation between registrars — worth checking on your own. Other extensions have different timings: check the ones for the domain in front of you. We covered this in detail in what to do when a client’s domain has expired.
But that isn’t the hard decision. The hard decision is hosting, which you’re paying for every month, and maintenance, which is your time. Suspending hosting takes the site offline and, if the mailboxes live there, kills the email too: it’s a strong lever and should be used knowing that. Suspending maintenance isn’t visible straight away, does no immediate damage, and stops the bleeding on the right side. In our experience it’s almost always the first thing to stop, and almost never the first thing people think of.
The weight of it: the maths on fifty clients
An agency with fifty clients handling a domain, hosting and maintenance for each has a hundred and fifty deadlines a year. Not a hundred and fifty emergencies: a hundred and fifty small three-part cycles, each with a notice to send, a payment to chase and a margin to work out.
The amounts differ wildly, which is why thinking in “deadlines” rather than in euros leads you astray. A domain sits at ten to fifteen euros a year. Hosting sits an order of magnitude above that. Annual maintenance sits two orders of magnitude above the domain. Give all three the same attention and you’re spending most of your time on the least significant one.
It’s also why a spreadsheet holds up while the client list is short. Under ten clients with one deadline each it’s perfectly fine and nothing else is needed. Above twenty or thirty clients with several services each it stops holding — not because the spreadsheet is wrong, but because nobody opens it every day, and that’s where the cycle breaks.
What are the most common mistakes when collecting renewals?
- Treating the notice as a courtesy. If it doesn’t carry the amount and a way to pay, it isn’t a payment request: it’s a reminder, and reminders don’t collect.
- Counting deadlines instead of euros. A hundred and fifty deadlines all look alike in a list. In your bank account they are nothing alike.
- Renewing before asking. The provider’s auto-renewal is convenient and puts you in a weak position: you’ve already paid, and now you have to ask.
- Not knowing who bought what. Some services the client bought themselves. If that isn’t written down anywhere, you find out when they break.
- Calculating margin only on bought-in services. On maintenance there’s no provider to buy from, the cost is your own time, and that’s exactly why it’s the line where margin disappears unnoticed.
- Leaving control to memory. It works, until it doesn’t. And when it stops you don’t notice straight away: you notice when a client calls because the site is down.
Where do you start collecting renewals?
- Inventory what you’re paying for. Don’t start from the clients: start from the last twelve months of bank statements and provider invoices. Something almost always turns up that you’re paying for a client who’s long gone.
- Attach every line to a client and an amount. You need two numbers per row: what you pay and what you charge. If the second is missing, you’ve found a problem.
- Keep type and provider apart. “Hosting” is a type of service, “Aruba” is who sells it to you. Two separate fields let you answer both “how many hosting plans do I have” and “how much do I spend with this provider”. We covered this in building a client deadline tracker.
- Decide the notice dates once. Not case by case. Two fixed moments, the same for everyone, written down somewhere that isn’t your head.
- Write the two messages. One that explains, one that closes. Reuse them every time: the time you save here is what lets you actually send them.
- Look at the numbers each quarter. Collected against spent, per client. The first time is uncomfortable. It’s also the only way to know whether the work you’re doing carries a margin.
If you’re weighing up whether the spreadsheet is still enough, we’ve set out the full comparison in the comparison between a spreadsheet and a real deadline tracker: it isn’t a contest, and there are cases where Excel wins.
How do we collect renewals ourselves?
Dotify is the tool we built at EnneStudio, our web agency in Padua, after losing a client to a forgotten renewal. It’s ours, so take what follows for what it is.
It does exactly the three moments in this guide: it collects deadlines with type, provider and amount, sends the notices to clients from your own email domain and under your own name, and records both the payment from the client and the cost to the provider, so per-service margin is a number you read rather than one you calculate. That’s what the deadline statuses are for: separating what you still have to collect from what you’ve collected.
The free plan holds five clients with three deadlines each, and the emails go out from our servers rather than your own domain: it’s there to show you how the thing works. To watch a reminder arrive under your own logo there’s the fourteen-day trial, no card required. Plans start at €7.99 a month.
