Negotiated is a promise. Realized is a fact.
The gap between what procurement negotiates and what the organization actually captures is the most common reason savings reports lose credibility with finance. Closing it is not a reporting exercise. It is a tracking discipline that starts at signature and does not stop until the value shows up in an invoice.
Four questions per line
A savings report survives scrutiny when it can answer four things about every initiative: what was the baseline and who agreed it, what mechanism converts the agreement into cash, who owns it in the business, and what evidence proves it landed.
A report that cannot answer those is a forecast, however it is labelled. The tracker is built around those four questions, expanded into nine fields.
Two of them do most of the work. Business owner is a named person outside procurement who agrees the number. Unowned savings do not land, reliably and without exception. Evidence is an invoice, not a contract: a signature is a promise, an invoice is a fact.
Watch the conversion rate
Realized divided by negotiated, across the portfolio, is the single number worth reporting. It tells you whether procurement is a negotiating function or a value function.
Teams that measure it improve it, because the gap stops being an accident nobody owns and becomes a metric somebody reports. The Excel version calculates it at the top of the sheet and turns any initiative converting below 80% red, which is usually the first sign of price loading that never happened or spend going around the contract.
Anything under 80% is worth an hour with the value leakage checklist. And before any of this means anything, procurement and finance need to agree the savings definition standard.