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Working guides from Value Lattice: the templates and tools a buyer can use on a real purchase. A white paper explains an idea with a worked example; the files here are the instruments themselves. Free to download, edit and issue. No sign-up, no email address.

Free to use and adapt. Everything on this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). You can use it, share it and change it for any purpose, including inside your own company. The one condition is credit: keep the attribution line naming The Value Standard and valuelattice.com, and say that you changed it if you did. Improvements are welcome. Adapting these to how your organization actually buys is how they get better.

The Request for Value

The one page the business owner writes before the market is asked. Word and Excel.

The RFI, RFQ and RFP each ask the supplier something. None of them makes the buyer’s own side write down what the purchase has to produce, so the definition of success arrives from the vendor inside the proposal. The Request for Value is that missing page. It has five parts, written before any supplier is engaged: the outcomes the purchase must produce, the metrics that will measure them with a baseline and a date, the conditions that must hold on both sides, the evidence a supplier must provide for a value claim to count, and the criteria by which responses will be compared.

The pack has four files. The template is completed internally first and then issued with the RFP. The response format makes two proposals comparable. The evidence checklist works on its own against a proposal already on your desk, and the workbook carries the same tables with the arithmetic in place.

Questions Before and During a Request for Value

The questions to ask inside your own organization before the RFV is written, and of suppliers once it is issued, with the answers that should worry you. Word.

Suppliers prepare for every serious deal with a set of discovery questions, and the answers end up in the business case they write. This guide gives the buyer the same habit. Part 1 holds ten questions for the business owner, finance, operations and IT, asked before the Request for Value is drafted. Part 2 holds eight questions for suppliers, asked once they have responded. Each question shows what it brings out, when to ask it, the answer that should worry you, and the part of the Request for Value it changes. A record sheet at the end keeps the answers in the words people used.

The Verification Line

One clause, written into the contract before signature, that says how the buyer will know the value arrived. Word.

The Request for Value writes down what the purchase has to produce. The Verification Line carries that into the contract: what evidence will show the value arrived, who produces that evidence, by when, and what follows if it does not. The template sets out the four parts with an example of each, the sample clause with its blanks marked, and a short table to complete internally before the RFP goes out. The wording is illustrative and should be adapted by counsel. The full explanation is on The Verification Line page.

The Decision Artifact Set

Three records that keep a purchase decision in view after signature: the Decision Memo, the Executive Readout and the Audit Record. Word and Excel.

The Request for Value and the Verification Line settle what the purchase has to produce and how the buyer will know it arrived. These three records carry the decision from there. The Decision Memo is written at commitment and records the outcomes, metrics, baselines and targets, along with the assumptions the decision rests on. The Executive Readout reports on a fixed cadence whether each outcome is arriving and whether those assumptions still hold. The Audit Record compares what was committed with what arrived, says whose conditions held, and writes each lesson as a change to the next decision. All three share one outcome table, so the numbers committed are the numbers checked.

The Word file holds the three templates and a worked example for a fictional distribution company, followed from memo to audit. The workbook carries the same records on linked sheets and works out planned progress, status, variance and the verdict. A completed Audit Record is the closing entry for that purchase in the Purchase Outcome Register below.

The Purchase Outcome Register

Every significant purchase, tied to the initiative it serves and a line on the financial statements. Excel, with a guide in Word.

A finance initiative usually arrives as a number on a line: take out cost, grow revenue, release cash, reduce exposure, add capacity for growth, or make two companies’ statements add up after an acquisition. Most of the spend that is supposed to deliver it runs through purchases. The register connects each significant purchase to the initiative it serves and the line of the income statement or balance sheet it should move, so a CFO can see whether the commitments cover the target and whether the results are arriving.

For each purchase, the business owner who will answer for the result writes the outcome in their own words. The row holds the baseline from the company’s own records, the target and its date, and the conditions on each side. At each check date the latest actual goes in, and the workbook works out progress, status, the profit effect and the cash released, kept apart. When a line is behind, it records whose condition failed: the company’s, the vendor’s, or both.

The workbook has seven sheets. Setup holds the statement baseline. Initiatives holds the targets the CFO was handed and flags any plan gap where commitments fall short. The Register holds the purchases. The Statement Bridge shows baseline, effect at target, pro forma and achieved, line by line. M&A Alignment builds a combined baseline for an acquisition and states, objective by objective, whether it was met. The Board Summary puts it on one page for the executive committee, board or audit committee.

Five rules are built in. The balance sheet and the income statement stay separate, so lower inventory counts as cash released and only the costs of holding it (storage, handling, insurance and obsolescence, plus interest if debt financed) reach the income statement. Revenue is the business owner’s claim, never a vendor’s, and counts only once the owner confirms it. Results are measured per unit where volume moves. The baseline comes from the company’s records, whoever proposes how to measure it. And only measured progress counts, capped at the target. The workbook opens with a worked example for a fictional distributor.

Related: the White Papers, which explain each instrument with a worked example, and the Request for Value definition page.

Buyer-Side Value Governance Self-Assessment

Five questions about how your organization buys, each scored from 1 to 5 against a written description: when value is defined, who holds the evaluation, how value is defined, what vendors must supply, and what happens after signature. Each score is backed by a piece of evidence you name yourself. A score with no evidence behind it is an opinion about your organization, and the point of the exercise is to replace that opinion with something a colleague can check.

The total is out of 25 and places you at one of five stages, from price governed to value governed. One rule overrides the total: your stage cannot be more than one level above your lowest single score. An organization that scores well on four questions and measures nothing after signature is not value governed, and the assessment says so.

Nothing is submitted anywhere. There is no form and no registration. The score is yours. Answer it again in six months and keep both sheets; the second one is where a change, or the absence of one, becomes visible.

Downloads

  • Take the self-assessment online. It runs in your browser, and nothing you choose is sent anywhere.
  • Buyer-Side Value Governance Self-Assessment (Word). The five questions with their score descriptions, the stage table, the reading notes for each stage, and a line for the evidence under every question. Fill it in by hand or in a meeting.
  • Self-Assessment Workbook (Excel). The same five questions with the total, the stage and the lowest-score rule calculated, a tab for Procurement, Finance and the requesting function to score side by side, and a tab to record the score again in six months.

How to use it

  1. Answer for a typical significant technology purchase, not for the policy and not for the best-run purchase you can remember. If two descriptions fit, take the lower one.
  2. Name the evidence under each score before you add anything up. If you cannot name a document, a record or a recent purchase, lower the score by one.
  3. If Procurement, Finance and the people who will use the product score separately, lay the sheets side by side. The lowest score is the real one.
  4. Work on the lowest-scoring question first, whatever the total says. The next move for each stage points at the RFV pack and the Evidence Checklist above.

Cite this: Brey, Michael (0009-0006-8285-596X) (2026). The Request for Value (RFV): a buyer-issued template pack for defining purchase outcomes before the market is asked. Value Lattice, LLC. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23289822

From The Value Standard by Michael Brey. Licensed CC BY 4.0.