Get the Baseline Signed Before You Earn It

The dispute that was not a surprise

I run sourcing programs where the fee depends on the savings being accepted. On one of them the findings went into writing as they were found and stayed in the correspondence for months. At the end, the stakeholder on the client side read the full set properly for the first time and contested most of the credit. The realistic landing was partial credit on work that was already complete.

Nothing new showed up at the end. Every number had been visible the whole time. What had never happened was acceptance.

That is the decision this article is about, and it is not a consulting problem. It governs any savings number someone will eventually be credited for: a supplier agreement with a negotiated reduction, a vendor contract with a shared-savings clause, or an internal sourcing team expecting credit at year end. The decision is who signs each baseline, and when.

Notification and acceptance are different events

Sending a finding and closing a finding feel like the same act because they use the same document. They are governed by opposite incentives.

At discovery, the recipient has no reason to argue. The change has not been made, no money has moved, and disagreeing costs them a conversation they can have later. Silence at that moment reads as agreement only to the sender. At pay time, the same recipient has every reason to argue, because the number now leaves their budget. The finding did not change. The incentive did.

The second half of the mechanism is authority. A signature from someone whose budget does not carry the number is a courtesy, not a closure. A sign-off from a plant contact, a category manager, or anyone else who will not be asked to fund the credit produces a record that does not bind the person who decides. When the credit is disputed, the dispute escalates to the budget holder, who is seeing the number for the first time and is under no obligation to inherit someone else's agreement.

This is not an argument about trust. Where the relationship is good, the signature is a formality that costs nobody anything. Where it is not, the signature is the only thing that holds. The uncomfortable part is that the programs where you most need the record are exactly the ones where asking for it feels most adversarial, which is why the request has to be structural. If it is situational, you will skip it precisely when it matters.

Why deferred acceptance converts into partial credit

Identified, implemented, and credited are three different states, and deferring acceptance collapses them into one argument held at the worst possible time.

By the time an invoice or a year-end credit is on the table, the cost of the work is sunk on your side and entirely behind you on theirs. That inverts the leverage the whole program was built on. You are no longer agreeing a baseline; you are defending one, against a counterparty whose best alternative is simply to disagree and wait.

Partial credit is what that dispute settles at. With no signed record on either side, splitting the number is the rational midpoint, so landing at half is not a judgment about the quality of the work. It is the arithmetic of a missing signature. Any pay-time question you did not close in advance, whether volume moved, whether the item was discontinued, whether an unrelated price change should count, becomes an argument you now have to win individually and retroactively.

Internal programs settle the same way. A sourcing team credited against a baseline that finance never signed will have the same discount applied by its own CFO, for the same reason and with less recourse.

Write the one page, then implement

The record is short enough that there is no good excuse for not having it. For each finding: the item or category, the baseline quantity, the baseline price, the new price, the effective date, and the statement that any later price change on that item is credited against this record. One page, one signature, dated.

Two rules make it work. It is signed by the person whose budget carries the number, not by whoever is most available. And it is signed before implementation, not after, because after implementation you are asking someone to agree to a bill rather than to a baseline.

Ownership sits with whoever runs the program. Not the analyst who found the number and not the executive who will approve the final credit, but the person accountable for the program closing. Their status report has two columns, accepted and unaccepted, and the unaccepted column gets read every month instead of surfacing once at the end.

Verification is the same test in reverse. Before any invoice or year-end credit references a savings number, the signature set behind it is complete. A finding with no signature is reported as unaccepted, not as savings. That rule costs you an awkward conversation early and removes the expensive one later.

What a closed program reads like

Every finding has a signed one-page baseline, dated before the change went in. The signer on each page is the budget holder for that line. The savings report separates accepted from unaccepted and is current to the month. No invoice cites a number without a signature behind it. The executive who will approve the final credit has already approved each piece of it, in writing, at the time it was agreed. There is no end-of-program reconciliation meeting, because there is nothing left to reconcile.

Sign the next one before you install it

Take the next finding on your list, the one that is about to be implemented. Write the one page. Get it signed by the person whose budget the credit lands against, before the change goes in.

If asking feels uncomfortable, that discomfort is the measurement. It is telling you what the number was going to be worth at pay time.