Uncontrolled spending may seem like a minor process gap, but in reality, it’s one of procurement’s most persistent value leaks. Maverick spend, purchases made outside of your approved procurement channels or negotiated supplier agreements, can silently erode margins, distort category strategies, and undermine supplier performance.
Despite well-established procurement policies, maverick spending challenges even the most mature organizations. It exposes businesses to compliance risks, weakens supplier relationships, and limits visibility into total spend, making it harder to optimize working capital and enforce ESG or risk controls.
In today’s volatile, cost-conscious market, this is a strategic liability. In this article, we’ll unpack the causes and consequences of maverick spend, and more importantly, show you how to identify, control, and reduce it through a mix of policy enforcement, process improvement, and technology-led visibility.
What is Maverick Spend?
Maverick spend, also referred to as rogue, off-contract, or unmanaged spend, is the procurement equivalent of a leak in your supply chain. In strategic procurement terms, maverick spend is any transaction that happens without following established procurement policies, such as sourcing from non-approved suppliers, bypassing e-procurement systems, or ignoring contract terms.
It occurs when employees make purchases outside of approved procurement channels or deviate from negotiated supplier agreements. While often unintentional, this behavior sidesteps the controls designed to drive compliance, cost savings, and supplier performance.
These purchases might seem small in isolation but can collectively represent a significant portion of total spend, especially in decentralized or fast-growing organizations.
A report by Spend Matters reveals that maverick spending can inflate procurement costs by up to 20%, primarily due to missed volume discounts, inconsistent payment terms, and loss of control over supplier performance and compliance.
Why Does Maverick Spend Happen?
Even with clearly defined policies, maverick buying often emerges from operational friction or structural gaps. Common causes include:
- Lack of Policy Awareness or Training: Employees may not fully understand procurement protocols or the importance of compliance.
- Cumbersome Procurement Workflows: Complex or slow approval processes often lead teams to bypass systems in favor of speed.
- Urgent or Ad-Hoc Requirements: When business needs arise quickly, especially in sales, marketing, or operations, purchasing rules can be unintentionally skipped.
- Decentralized Purchasing: Without centralized oversight, local teams may prioritize convenience over consistency.
Types of Maverick Spend
Not all maverick spend is created equal. Understanding its variations helps you target the right interventions:
- Unknown and Uncontrolled: These are purchases made from unapproved suppliers without any prior vetting or visibility. They represent the highest compliance and risk exposure.
- Partly Known and Controlled: The supplier may be known, but the transaction happens outside contracted terms, such as paying a higher price, using outdated delivery terms, or exceeding budget thresholds.
- Known and Partly Controlled: Purchases occur under existing contracts but deviate from agreed conditions, for example, ordering items not included in the negotiated product list or exceeding volume caps.
By identifying the types and root causes of maverick spend in your organization, you can begin building a more compliant, cost-effective, and transparent procurement environment.
Now that you understand what maverick spend is and why it occurs, the next step is to evaluate the risks it introduces. While off-contract purchases might appear harmless or even helpful in the short term, their long-term impact on financial health, operational efficiency, and regulatory compliance can be significant and often underestimated.
Risks and Consequences of Maverick Spend
Financial Implications
Maverick spending often bypasses negotiated supplier agreements, eroding the cost advantages you’ve worked hard to secure. When buyers go off-contract:
- Volume discounts are lost, undermining economies of scale.
- Pricing becomes inconsistent, increasing per-unit costs across categories.
- Procure-to-pay costs rise, as processing non-standard purchases typically requires more manual intervention.
This not only inflates operational costs but also makes budgeting and forecasting less reliable.
Operational Challenges
Beyond the numbers, maverick spend introduces friction that can strain internal workflows and external relationships:
- Contract compliance weakens, making it difficult to enforce SLAs, warranties, or negotiated service terms.
- Supplier relationships suffer, as fragmented purchasing behavior may create conflicting communication or unpredictable order volumes.
- Spend visibility declines, preventing procurement teams from consolidating data for category analysis, supplier rationalization, or cost optimization.
In short, when everyone buys on their own terms, procurement loses its ability to steer spend strategically.
Compliance and Legal Risks
Procurement doesn’t operate in a vacuum. Maverick spend exposes the business to broader governance and reputational risks:
- Regulatory non-compliance becomes a concern when purchases fail to meet ESG, anti-bribery, or industry-specific standards.
- Sourcing from unvetted suppliers may result in low-quality products, data security gaps, or non-compliance with labor or sustainability standards.
- In industries like healthcare, defense, or pharmaceuticals, unauthorized procurement can even result in legal penalties or license risks.
Most procurement leaders cite supplier risk as a top concern, and maverick spending often flies under the radar of standard risk controls.
Recognizing the risks of maverick spend is only the first step. The real value comes from putting systems in place that help you prevent it. Let’s explore the strategic levers you can pull to bring rogue spending under control and strengthen procurement performance across the board.
Also read 6 Steps to Manage Common Procurement Risks
Strategies to Control Maverick Spend
The following strategies are designed to help you identify, reduce, and prevent maverick spend across your procurement operations, improving compliance, efficiency, and cost control in the process.
1. Policy and Process Enhancements
A strong foundation starts with clear rules. Without well-defined procurement policies, even well-intentioned employees may sidestep formal processes.
- Establish robust procurement policies that outline when and how employees can make purchases.
- Set approval workflows and spend thresholds to control discretionary purchases and enforce accountability.
- Document purchasing authority clearly to avoid ambiguity about who can buy what and from whom.
Organizations with clearly defined procurement processes see significantly lower non-compliant spend compared to those without.
2. Employee Training and Engagement
Often, maverick spend stems not from defiance but from a lack of understanding or user frustration.
- Conduct regular training sessions to educate employees about approved procurement workflows and the risks of bypassing them.
- Create a feedback loop that encourages employees to report pain points in the procurement process. Simplifying a cumbersome system is often the fastest way to reduce non-compliance.
- Promote procurement awareness across business units, linking compliant spend to business outcomes like cost control, supplier quality, and risk mitigation.
Well-informed employees are far more likely to follow procedures when they understand the “why” behind the “how.”
3. Technology and Automation
Digital tools can significantly reduce the manual friction that leads to maverick spending in the first place.
- Deploy an e-procurement platform that offers a user-friendly interface, pre-approved supplier catalogs, and real-time approvals. This removes the incentive to go outside the system.
- Use spend analysis software to track purchase patterns, detect non-compliant transactions, and identify at-risk categories.
- Automate approvals and budget checks to prevent purchases from being processed without oversight.
Research by The Hackett Group shows that organizations using digital procurement tools report faster purchasing cycles and 45% reductions in rogue spend.
4. Supplier Management
When employees don’t know who the preferred suppliers are, or can’t access them easily, they often resort to alternatives.
- Maintain an up-to-date list of approved vendors with pre-negotiated terms, pricing, and service levels.
- Ensure supplier catalogs are embedded directly within your e-procurement system.
- Review supplier performance regularly, flagging issues that lead users to seek alternatives outside the contract network.
Strategic supplier alignment not only curbs off-contract purchases but also builds stronger vendor relationships that support long-term value.
Controlling maverick spend doesn’t require micromanagement, and it requires visibility, structure, and collaboration. Now, we’ll explore how platforms like akirolabs can help you operationalize these strategies at scale.
How akirolabs Helps You Eliminate Maverick Spend
Many companies try to control maverick spend by tightening approval processes or issuing policy memos. However, without strategic alignment and real-time visibility, these efforts often fall short. That is where akirolabs provides a transformative solution.
akirolabs is a generative AI-powered Procurement Strategy Operating System that embeds spend discipline directly into your procurement processes. It eliminates rogue spend at its roots, rather than addressing it only after it occurs.
Here is how akirolabs achieves this:
1. Strategy-Aligned Spend Controls from the Start
akirolabs ensures that all category strategies are based on approved suppliers, budgets, and sourcing logic. This upfront clarity provides employees with a clear framework to engage with spend effectively, reducing ambiguity and minimizing off-contract purchasing. Key features include:
- Pre-aligned supplier lists, key performance indicators, and value levers.
- Stakeholder-approved goals that drive compliant execution.
- Spend playbooks designed to align procurement activities with business outcomes.
2. Real-Time Visibility into Spend Deviations
akirolabs empowers procurement teams to identify off-strategy spend early by using anomaly detection and category-level dashboards. This approach is more than reactive monitoring; it provides strategic oversight. Important capabilities include:
- Live dashboards that highlight rogue purchases by category, region, or user.
- AI-driven insights that detect early signs of maverick behavior.
- Alerts for category managers before deviations escalate into costly trends.
3. Stakeholder Co-Creation Drives Buy-In
akirolabs actively involves business users in the creation of procurement strategies. When stakeholders participate in defining sourcing decisions, they are more likely to adhere to the rules because they have ownership. This is supported by:
- Collaborative workflows that align procurement, finance, and operations teams.
- Customizable templates that simplify stakeholder engagement.
- Policy adherence that becomes an embedded part of the process rather than an externally enforced mandate.
4. Closed-Loop Category Execution
akirolabs maintains procurement visibility beyond strategy creation by tracking execution in real time. This allows for timely course correction before non-compliance escalates. Key benefits include:
- Built-in execution tracking, milestone monitoring, and KPI dashboards.
- Full traceability of category strategy and purchasing behavior.
- Strategic maverick-proofing for high-risk categories such as marketing, IT, and tail spend.
Ready to close the leaks in your procurement strategy? Book your demo with akirolabs and take control of maverick spend, proactively.
Conclusion
Unchecked maverick spending inflates costs, undermines compliance, erodes supplier relationships, and weakens procurement strategy. But with the right combination of policy, technology, and process discipline, you can regain control and turn rogue spending into a source of strategic value.
Start by building clear procurement policies, engaging employees through consistent training, and leveraging data to monitor spend behaviors. Most importantly, empower your teams with the right tools.
Ready to rein in maverick spend and improve procurement performance? Discover how akirolabs can help you centralize control, enhance visibility, and eliminate rogue purchases, efficiently and at scale.
Book a Demo with akirolabs and take the first step toward smarter, compliant procurement.
