quick admin question and i believe i have researched, i probably just need confirmation. i am assuming there is no contract management in the Base NetSuite installation? Sales uses and external program so I was wondering if there was something i could populate with some simple basic contract info, besides creating a custom fields/forms/records. thanks for any response or guidance..

there is a contract renewal module for software verticals, which is technically not a CLM ((contract Lifecycle Management). You can integrate most of CLM- docusignCLM (springCM), Adobe Esign/contract, Pandadocs etc. For your test case would be to use custom field and records to hold contract data in netsuite. With custom record and custom fields in transactions would be able to track your contractual details. I would use a custom record to hold tall the contract data and make it a child of the entity(vendor/customer) this will allow you to manipulate data efficiently.

I would very much not recommend the Contract Renewals module. It's a rat's nest of scripts and workflows that drag down the performance of pretty much everything in your sales workflow. And it doesn't even work very well, except for very specific use cases.

Thank you both for your insights..