Contract lifecycle
What a contract's status controls, the six states it can be in, and every real way it moves between them.
A contract's terms decide what to bill. Its status decides whether to bill at all, right now. Summance won't run an invoice cadence, recognize revenue against a term, or charge a single seat on a contract that isn't Active, no matter how complete its terms are. That split is what lets a customer go on hold without anyone rewriting their contract, and it's what lets a deal that fell through get cleared out without anyone treating it as a real, billed customer.
A contract moves through six statuses over its life, along a fixed set of paths, never a free-for-all where any status can follow any other. A contract that's already billing can't quietly drop back to Draft. One that's been canceled can't be switched back to Active. The rest of this page covers what each status means, every real way a contract reaches it, and why the paths between them are shaped the way they are.
The six statuses
Draft. Created, but inert. Nothing bills, nothing accrues, and nothing about it is final yet.
Active. Billing on schedule. Its invoice cadence is running, and its terms are what Summance actually charges against.
Paused. Billing suspended on purpose, without losing anything. The cadence stops running rather than getting deleted, so resuming picks up cleanly, with the contract's full history intact.
Canceled. Stopped deliberately, before its term was due to finish. Terminal: once a contract is Canceled, nothing brings it back to Active.
Discarded. Dropped before it ever billed. Terminal too, but a different story than Canceled — this is a contract that never went live at all, not one that ran and then stopped.
Executed. Completed its full term on schedule. Terminal, and the one status designed to happen without anyone deciding to end anything.
How a contract becomes Draft
Every contract starts here, however it was created: typed or uploaded on the New Contract screen, described to Penny in chat, submitted through the API, or pulled automatically from a Closed Won CRM deal. See Contract ingestion for all four in full; this page picks up from Draft onward.
How a contract becomes Active
Two ways in, and both start billing on schedule the moment they complete.
- Activate a Draft. Click Activate on the contract's detail page, or ask Penny to do it from that same page. Your own app can also call
POST /v1/contracts/{contract_uuid}/activatedirectly, with nobody in the app at all. However it's triggered, Summance stands up the invoice cadence and posts the contract's first economic events. - Resume a Paused contract. Click Resume, or ask Penny, and the suspended cadence picks back up on the same schedule it left off.
An Active contract's detail page. The actions shown change with a contract's status.
How a contract becomes Paused
One way in: click Pause on an Active contract's detail page — the same control visible in the screenshot above — or ask Penny. The cadence suspends rather than stopping for good, and it can be resumed as many times as needed.
How a contract becomes Canceled
One way in, and it only starts from Paused: click Cancel on a Paused contract's detail page, or ask Penny. There's no direct Active-to-Canceled path — see Why the paths are shaped this way below for why.
A Paused contract's detail page. Resume and Cancel are the only status changes available from Paused.
A Canceled contract's detail page. No status actions are offered at all — Canceled is terminal.
How a contract becomes Discarded
Two ways in, and both only apply to a Draft:
- Discard it directly. Click Discard on a Draft contract's detail page — the same control shown on a CRM-pulled draft in Contract ingestion.
- Automatically, for an orphaned CRM-pulled draft. If the Salesforce or HubSpot deal behind a Draft contract stops being Closed Won before anyone reviews it — reopened, un-won, or removed from the CRM — Summance retires that draft on its own. Editing a deal that's still Closed Won doesn't trigger this. Nobody has to notice and clean it up by hand.
A contract discarded directly, from its own detail page.
A CRM-pulled draft that was retired automatically, after its source deal fell out of Closed Won.
How a contract becomes Executed
This is the one status nobody has to set by hand. Every night, Summance checks every Active contract on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly invoice cadence against its own final term. Once that term has ended and enough time has passed for the period's last invoice to actually go out, Summance marks the contract Executed and winds down its billing on its own.
There's no Execute button on a contract's detail page, and no screenshot in this section — there's nothing to click. On the cadences automatic completion covers, a contract that runs its full course reaches Executed without anyone closing it out.
Weekly is the one cadence it doesn't cover. A weekly-cadence contract is never completed automatically: it stays Active once its terms end, and there's no way to move it to Executed by hand either.
Don't look for a way to mark a contract Executed by hand. There's no control for it on the contract detail page, and no endpoint for it in the contracts API.
Valid transitions
Why the paths are shaped this way
Cancel only works from Paused, never directly from Active. Stopping a contract for good is a bigger decision than pausing one, so Summance makes you take the smaller, reversible step first. There's no one-click way to cancel a contract that's actively billing.
Draft can't go straight to Paused. Pausing only means something for a contract that was already billing. A Draft never started, so there's nothing to suspend.
Canceled, Discarded, and Executed don't lead anywhere. All three are terminal, and deliberately so. A canceled or completed contract represents something that already happened; reopening it would mean pretending it didn't. If the business relationship continues, that's a new contract, not a revived old one.
Canceled and Discarded look similar but mean different things. Canceled is for a contract that billed, then stopped early. Discarded is for one that never billed at all. The distinction isn't cosmetic — it's the difference between a customer relationship that ended and one that never started.