Need Help - Best Practice for Contract/Subscription Tracking

My current goal is to create a space or folder to track various licenses/contracts.

As with most companies, we have many maintenance contracts and software subscriptions that need to be tracked. I am attempting to use Wrike to track two types of tasks:

1. Renewals - These will be based on the date the license/contract expire
2. Renewal Reviews - These will be based on a few different parameters but have a longer time span than renewal tasks (Normally at least 1 month before the renewal with the license/contract expiration as the end date).

I created a calendar for the renewal tasks to quickly look at what is coming up for renewal in any given month. I made the tasks recurrent but then ran into issues with the new tasks not showing up in the calendar view. I determined this was due to not using smart layers. I switched to smart layers, but when a new recurrent task was created, the custom fields I had that I was basing the smart layers on came over blank, even when the initial task had them filled in. I looked through the Wrike community posts and saw that this is an issue many people have brought up since recurrent tasks were created, but there are no current plans for the issue to be looked into. 

The custom fields become useless in recurring tasks, so my question is, are other people tracking contracts in Wrike? If so, how are you doing it? Does Wrike have a best practice for this that avoids going through and updating hundreds of tasks? The only thing I can think of is to create various folders instead of using custom fields. This is not my ideal solution as I think it can become clunky and harder to maintain.

Any thoughts or advice are welcome.