Procurement teams are under pressure to show measurable impact. Whether you're renegotiating supplier contracts or streamlining sourcing processes, cost savings are the easiest way to prove procurement's value. The problem? Too many teams are still relying on scattered spreadsheets and inconsistent methods.
We've created a free Procurement Cost Savings Tracker in spreadsheet to help you get started. But before you download it, let's walk through why tracking matters, what credible savings really look like, and how to avoid common pitfalls.
This template gives you a simple, structured way to log, track, and report savings across vendors, departments, and spend categories, all in one place.
Built in Google Sheets, it’s fully editable, includes example data, and comes with built-in formulas to calculate savings in dollars and percentages. Whether you're managing office supply costs or negotiating enterprise contracts, this tracker helps you show the real impact of your work.
Here is the template:
Cost savings are the universal language of procurement performance. But savings claims mean nothing without visibility, validation, and repeatability.
A simple tracker helps you to:
Log savings opportunities consistently
Compare baseline vs. negotiated costs
Separate real savings from soft assumptions
Share impact with finance and leadership
Even if you're just tracking negotiated price drops, that's a major step toward maturity.
You don’t need fancy software to get started. Our spreadsheet template includes:
Fields for vendor, date, category, and business unit
Side-by-side cost comparisons
Auto-calculated savings ($ and %)
Status tags (Planned, Confirmed, Realized)
This makes it easy to track savings over time, by project, or by department. Download it once and make a copy for each quarter, initiative, or buyer.
Hard savings (e.g., price reductions) are the most defensible. Soft savings (e.g., time saved) are valuable but harder to measure. Here's how to boost credibility:
If you're comparing year-over-year spend, normalize it. Scope creep and timing shifts can make savings look bigger than they are.
Excel works fine at first. But as you add more vendors, more buyers, and more initiatives, it gets harder to keep control. Without audit trails, shared logic, or standardized rules, savings data becomes fragile and easy to game. A simple tracker can turn into a credibility liability.
When you scale you can explore a cloud-based procurement systems like Zeiv. It helps you to enforce approval workflows, version control, integrate savings data with your financial system, and provides you with a smart dashboard.
Your savings process should scale with your vendor count and spend volume.