Evidence first. People second.

We take your accounts payable ledger, your ERP spend data and your contract estate — whatever condition it is in. Scanned PDFs, a shared drive, a filing cabinet someone photographed. We have yet to meet a client whose contract estate was tidy.

Out of that comes a single evidenced baseline: what you spend, with whom, under what terms. For most organisations this is the first complete picture they have ever had, and it is frequently the most uncomfortable slide in the pack.

Our tooling reads the baseline and surfaces every recoverable opportunity across the four dimensions — then sizes each one. Duplicate spend. Licences billed for people who left. Contracts drifting toward auto-renewal. Rates that stopped being market three years ago.

This is the Meruit Value Roadmap: a ranked list, each line carrying a number, a dimension, a source document and a route to recovering it. It is the deliverable of Discovery, and it is yours whether or not you go further.

Nothing is negotiated without your sign-off. Every opportunity on the Roadmap is approved, deferred or rejected by you before anyone contacts a supplier — and that approval is a named, timestamped decision recorded against the line, not a default that happens through silence.

Some opportunities you will not want us to take. A supplier relationship is strategic; a renegotiation is badly timed. Those come off the Roadmap and out of the target — they are not counted as a shortfall against the guarantee. We would rather carry a smaller number we can stand behind.

Commercial professionals — people who have run these categories and sat on the other side of these negotiations — take the approved list and execute it. Renegotiate, retender, consolidate, reclaim.

Evidence is captured as the work happens, not reconstructed at the end. A saving only counts once it is confirmed against an artefact: a signed variation, a supplier proposal, an updated pricing schedule. Never a status flipped in a spreadsheet.

Realised savings are validated jointly with your finance function against an independent tracker — not signed off by the people who delivered them. If your CFO cannot see the saving land in the accounts, it is not a saving. A cost that reappears on another budget line does not count either.

This is not a one-off exercise. Governance continues after handover: you keep a live view of what was found, what was approved, what was delivered and what it was worth — because leakage returns unless somebody is watching.