Using Excel to Manage Contract Negotiations?

Hi folks,

I run a medium/large IT company and we currently have open negotiations with 35 different organisations. We are currently using a combination of Excel and Mail for Mac to manage and keep track of these numerous contract negotiations.

Excel: a table listing company, country, product, negotiation status etc.
Mail: storing emails in folders to provide a history of each negotiation.

Unfortunately, this isn't working very well - there must be a better way? The Excel table has been useful, but we would like to see how each contract negotiation evolves over a 2-3 month period perhaps in a timeline. But the Excel timeline templates seem to be for single projects only. We have 35 projects running simultaneously, with frequent milestones.

How do big companies like Samsung, Apple, and Amazon manage their contract negotiations?

http://tinyurl.com/ybb4ewpe