Contract Renewal and Leverage Window Planner — Notice Deadlines, Leverage Start Dates and Value Locked In

Description
Leverage does not expire at the contract end date. It expires at the notice deadline, minus the time you would need to qualify an alternative, minus the time your own organisation takes to approve one. Before that date you have a choice. After it, you have a renewal, and the supplier knows the difference even when you do not.

This register calculates that date for every contract you hold. Enter the supplier, the annual value, the contract end date, the notice period, the realistic switching lead time and your internal approval lead time. It returns the notice deadline, the leverage start date, the days remaining, and a status flag: Act now, Prepare, Monitor or Locked in. Everything recalculates against today, so opening the file is the review.

The summary sheet totals the annual value in each state, and produces the number worth taking to a steering group: the share of your contracted value that is already locked in, and will therefore be renewed rather than negotiated this year. In most organisations running this for the first time, that figure sits somewhere between a quarter and a half, and nobody knew. It converts an abstract argument about starting renewals earlier into a number with a currency symbol in front of it.
The field people get wrong is the switching lead time. Ask someone who has actually run that tender rather than reading the category plan, and add the internal approval time separately, because it is routinely longer than the sourcing itself and routinely forgotten.

Forty rows are supplied with four worked examples, dated so that all four statuses appear. Nothing is locked and every formula is visible.