How to Reduce Maverick Spending Across Departments

This article is brought to you in association with Amazon Business.

Maverick spend, purchasing that takes place outside approved channels, contracts or supplier lists, is not a fringe problem.

According to the American Productivity and Quality Center, maverick buying accounted for 1.8% of annual purchase value across organisations surveyed in 2021 and 2022.

The causes are rarely malicious. Research consistently points to process friction as the primary driver. When approval chains are long, policies are poorly communicated, or preferred supplier catalogues are difficult to access, employees make their own arrangements.

A team facing a tight deadline to procure IT equipment or professional services will not wait three weeks for a purchase order to clear four sign-off layers. They will call the supplier they already know. The purchase gets made; the contract compliance rate takes a quiet hit.

Decentralised buying authority compounds the problem. In organisations where individual business units hold their own budgets and maintain their own supplier relationships, spend fragments across dozens of micro-procurement decisions that never surface in a central ledger.

A 2024 Gartner analysis found that nearly 40% of SaaS spending goes unmonitored across organisations, software purchases made outside approved channels, often without finance or IT ever being aware.

Policy gaps play a role too. Vague or incomplete procurement guidelines leave employees to interpret the rules differently and without regular training, many simply do not know that a preferred supplier or negotiated contract exists for the category they are buying in.

Guided buying and approval workflows

The most effective counter to maverick spend is not tighter enforcement, but making compliant purchasing the easier option. Guided buying achieves this by surfacing approved suppliers, pre-negotiated prices and contract-aligned product options at the point of purchase, removing the temptation to search elsewhere.

Modern eProcurement platforms embed this logic directly into the buying experience. Rather than presenting employees with a blank requisition form, they present a curated catalogue of approved options, with negotiated rates displayed in real time. The decision to buy from the right supplier becomes, in effect, the default.

Research from the Hackett Group in 2025 found that world-class procurement teams, those that have invested in reducing rogue buying and improving contract compliance, recorded 60% less savings leakage than their peers.

Approval workflows must be equally well-designed. Bottlenecks are a leading driver of off-contract purchasing, and procurement teams that have not audited their requisition processes recently are likely to find unnecessary approval layers slowing down low-value, low-risk purchases.

Intelligent automation can address this directly: rules-based systems that approve routine purchases under a defined threshold within 24 hours eliminate the urgency that drives workarounds, while flagging higher-value or higher-risk transactions for human review. The goal is speed for the compliant route, not bureaucracy.

Stakeholder engagement at a senior level also matters. When leadership visibly endorses procurement policy and holds departments accountable for compliance, the cultural signal is clear. Conversely, where procurement is perceived as a back-office function that slows things down, maverick behaviour is normalised and difficult to reverse.

Improving visibility

Control over maverick spend is inseparable from spend visibility. Procurement teams cannot address purchasing behaviour they cannot see, and in organisations without consolidated spend data, the full scale of off-contract activity often remains unknown until an audit surfaces it.

Spend analytics tools address this by aggregating transactional data across the business, drawing from ERP systems, accounts payable records and purchase order logs, to produce a coherent picture of where money is going, to whom and under what terms.

Dashboards that highlight tail spend, non-PO invoices and transactions from unapproved vendors allow procurement teams to identify problem areas quickly and prioritise interventions accordingly. The Ardent Partners Procurement Metrics report found that world-class procurement teams achieve a contract compliance rate of nearly 75%, compared to an average of 59.5%, a gap that reflects, in large part, the quality of visibility those teams maintain.

Spend data also strengthens the case for procurement's strategic position within the business. When procurement can demonstrate the cost of non-compliance in concrete terms, savings leaked, pricing consistency lost, supplier relationships strained, it shifts the conversation from process policing to value protection. That reframing is often what is needed to secure the cross-functional cooperation that sustainable compliance requires.

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​This article is brought to you in association with Amazon Business.

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