Ten questions that grade a major purchase by the risk it actually carries, from switching difficulty to vendor dependency, and tell you how much independent review it deserves before signature.
Not every contract deserves the same scrutiny, and treating them all alike means the dangerous ones get the same review as the routine ones. Answer for the specific purchase in front of you; the calculation is fixed-point and runs entirely in your browser.
Last reviewed 3 July 2026 · Free and ungated
Independent review does its best work while the terms are still drafts. Put the shortlist to the Global Board and selected senior operators who have bought, run and exited comparable contracts will report back confidentially.
Review this before committingAnswer for this specific contract as it will actually be signed, not as it was originally scoped.
On these answers the commercial exposure is contained: the commitment is modest, exit is realistic and the organisation has bought this kind of thing before. Formal independent review is unlikely to be the best use of anyone's time here.
This purchase carries real dependency or complexity in specific areas, even if the headline value looks manageable. Contracts in this band are where organisations most often skip review, because nothing about the deal looks alarming until it is signed.
The combination of value, dependency and complexity makes this one of the purchases most likely to be regretted. The risk is not only vendor selection. It is execution dependency after the contract is signed, when the balance of power shifts to the supplier.
The purchases that damage organisations are rarely the biggest ones, which get scrutiny automatically. They are the mid-sized contracts that combine long duration, deep embedding and a first-time buying team: a mid-market manufacturer weighing two ERP quotes carries more real exposure than a far larger deal for a substitutable commodity. Value is only one of ten factors here, and often not the decisive one.
The most useful moment is after shortlisting and before final negotiation, when the requirements are real but the terms are still movable. Run it again if the scope changes materially during negotiation, because a contract that grows a systems-integration tail or doubles its duration is no longer the purchase you originally assessed.
Each answer contributes 0, 5 or 10 points towards a risk total normalised to 100, where higher means more reason for independent review before signature. The bands are deliberately about review priority rather than deal quality: a high score does not say the purchase is wrong, it says signing it unexamined would be.
Yes, and arguably more so. Trust built on previous contracts tends to lower scrutiny exactly when a new deal changes the shape of the dependency. Score the contract in front of you, not the relationship behind it.
Not necessarily. A high score argues for depth of review, which can often run in parallel with negotiation. What it argues against is letting the signature date determine how much challenge the deal receives.
Because the absence of outside challenge compounds every other risk. A complex, embedded, multi-year deal that no one outside the buying team has examined carries the buying team's blind spots straight into the contract.