6 min read
Every procurement team I've ever worked with has a maverick spend number, and almost all of them talk about it the same way: as evidence that someone in the business went rogue. I've come to believe that's the wrong instinct. When a colleague swipes a personal card for software you'd already negotiated, the more useful question isn't "why won't they follow the process?" It's "why was going around us the easier option?"
This article covers what maverick spend is, why it really happens, what it costs, and the practical steps that can reduce it.
Key takeaways:
- Maverick spend is any purchase an employee makes outside procurement's approved channels: off an approved supplier list, past a negotiated contract, or around the standard approval workflow.
- It can erode as much as 16 percent of the savings a procurement team works hard to negotiate, according to research from The Hackett Group.
- It's usually a symptom rather than a crime: the same report reveals 75 percent of procurement teams blame missing self-service or guided buying tools, not willful non-compliance.
- The fix is to make the compliant path the easy one, for instance through disciplined "no PO, no pay" policies.
What is maverick spend?
Maverick spend is business purchasing that bypasses established procurement policies, approved suppliers, or negotiated contract terms. It usually happens when employees choose speed or convenience over the official channel: buying from an unapproved source, ignoring a preferred supplier, or skipping the requisition step entirely. It is also known as rogue spend or off-contract spend.
The three terms are effectively interchangeable, though each carries a slightly different flavor. "Rogue" emphasizes the person who went around the rules, "off-contract" emphasizes the money that leaked past a negotiated agreement, and "maverick" sits somewhere in between. Whatever you call it, the mechanics are the same: value the organization already secured gets left on the table because a purchase happened somewhere procurement couldn't see or shape it.
Why maverick spend really happens
The default reading of maverick spend is a compliance story: people know the rules and break them anyway. That framing feels intuitive, and it's almost always incomplete. Most off-contract buying isn't rebellion. It's a workaround.
Tim Jones, former VP of Business Operations at Epic Games, put it more bluntly than I would have dared:
"One of the most dangerous phrases in the procurement dictionary is maverick spend. It implies that there are people out there who are ignoring us or somehow doing the wrong thing, when in reality they're just a bunch of users who we've often let down, who are so exhausted by the bureaucracy we've built around them that they found a better way to get the business done."
Tim Jones, former VP of Business Operations, Epic Games (Art of Procurement, Episode 448)
I keep coming back to that line because it flips the accountability. If someone needed to buy something and couldn't do it through us without pain, the maverick purchase is a signal that procurement put the wrong deal, or the wrong process, in place to begin with. The stakeholder isn't the failure point; the experience we designed for them is. Treating procurement as a service provider means owning that. If the "product" we offer the business is slower than a corporate card and a web checkout, people will reach for the checkout every time.
I've made a version of this argument on the podcast myself, and it's worth stating plainly:
"Sometimes when I think about maverick spend, I think, well, that meant that procurement put the wrong deal in place in the first place if somebody needed to go and buy and not comply with it."
Philip Ideson (Art of Procurement, Episode 688)
That distinction matters because it changes what you do next. If maverick spend is misbehavior, the natural response is more policy and more policing. If it's a signal that the deal, or the buying experience around it, fell short, the response is to fix the deal. One treats the symptom; the other removes the cause. Put another way: if the "product" we offer the business is slower than a corporate card and a web checkout, people will reach for the checkout every time.
The data backs the reframe. In The Hackett Group's User Experience and Maverick Spend Study, 75 percent of procurement professionals named a lack of self-service or guided buying tools as one of the biggest causes of maverick purchases, ranking it above any "our people just won't comply" explanation. This doesn't excuse genuinely reckless buying, and it doesn't mean controls are optional. It means the most reliable way to reduce maverick spend is to make the compliant path the easy one, rather than policing the hard one.
What maverick spend actually costs
Individual maverick purchases are usually small, and so they're easy to wave off. A single recurring software subscription on someone's expense report doesn't look like a crisis. In aggregate, though, the cost adds up quickly, and it shows up in three ways.
The first is savings leakage. When a purchase skips a negotiated contract, the organization pays retail, or close to it, instead of the rate procurement fought for. The Hackett Group's study put a number on it: respondents believed they lose as much as 16 percent of negotiated savings to maverick buying, with the heaviest losses in categories like finished goods for resale, sales and marketing support, and HR services. Multiply that gap across thousands of small transactions and the annual figure gets serious quickly.
The second is compliance and supplier risk. An unvetted supplier hasn't been through security review, data-protection checks, or the certifications your category may require. Hackett uses a vivid example: a medical professional who ends up with mechanic-grade gloves instead of sterile, medical-grade ones because the purchase skipped the approved channel. Off-contract buying quietly onboards suppliers nobody assessed, and you often discover the gap only when something has already gone wrong.
The third is operational drag. Every rogue invoice is a small tax on the accounts payable and procurement teams, who spend time reconciling purchases that don't match a purchase order instead of doing higher-value work. The cost isn't just the price premium. It's the hours spent cleaning up after the fact.
How to reduce maverick spend
Reducing maverick spend is less about tightening enforcement and more about closing the gap between the easy way to buy and the compliant way to buy. Three moves do most of the work.
Make the compliant path the path of least resistance
Guided buying is the single highest-leverage change. When employees have a curated catalog of pre-approved suppliers and pre-negotiated pricing, and the buying flow is genuinely fast, compliance stops being a chore and becomes the default. It shows in the numbers: the top performers in the Hackett study, the organizations that invest in making buying easy, hit 91 percent on-contract compliance on average, against 74 percent for their typical peers. The goal is to make the sanctioned route quicker than the workaround, because, as Tim Jones's point makes clear, people follow the route of least friction, not the route of most virtue.
Put controls where they actually bite
Policy only works when it has teeth, and the most effective enterprises pair guided buying with a firm procure-to-pay backbone. Merck offers a striking example. In Art of Procurement Episode 370, Tom Cicale, former VP of Procurement at Merck, described a "no PO, no pay" policy the company had run for years. They still pay invoices that arrive without a purchase order, but they deliberately make the process "very painful," calling suppliers to tell them not to accept orders without a PO, and holding up payment until it's resolved.
The result is the kind of number most organizations of that size would envy: average maverick spend around 2.1 percent. What makes it work isn't the policy alone. It's the discipline behind it.
Measure it, monthly, and close the loop
Merck tracks maverick spend every month, by sector, on a governance report card that sits alongside savings, cost avoidance, days payable outstanding, and other operating metrics. Requisitions that should have gone through the managed spot-buy desk get identified and redirected, so the same leak doesn't recur next month. That closed loop, spotting the off-contract purchase, routing it back into the managed process, and removing the reason it happened, is what turns a policy into a downward trend rather than a static rule nobody watches.
Training belongs in the mix too, but as reinforcement rather than the main event. Explaining why the policy exists helps willing employees stay compliant. It won't fix a buying experience that's slower than the alternative.
How to calculate your maverick spend rate
Maverick spend is usually expressed as a percentage of total addressable spend: the value of purchases made outside approved channels divided by total spend that could have gone through those channels, times 100. Tracking it by category or business unit, rather than as one company-wide figure, tells you where the compliant path is breaking down, and that's where the fix belongs.
The bottom line on maverick spend
Maverick spend is real, and the leakage it causes is worth chasing. But the most effective procurement teams treat the number as feedback rather than an accusation.
When people go around you, they're telling you something about the path you built. Fix the path, and the number tends to follow.
