Maverick Spending Causes and Prevention

APQC's benchmark puts maverick buying at 1.8% of annual purchase value, based on 2021 to 2022 data. That sounds small until it's scaled: a company spending $1 billion a year is leaking around $18 million to purchases that never went through an approved process. Research from CIPS found off-contract purchasing running as high as 80% of all invoices at some large organizations, including ones with dedicated procurement teams. The Hackett Group pegs nearly 30% of indirect spend as off-contract, with some researchers still finding that 80% ceiling in the worst cases. The wide range exists because maverick spend resists being counted: when purchasing, receiving, and invoicing don't share data, no one can total what never got logged.

The savings impact is concrete. Freehand.ai puts the annual loss at 5% to 16% of targeted savings from maverick buying alone. Esker's research estimates that companies buying outside approved contracts lose 10% to 50% of their negotiated savings. For a company spending a few hundred million a year, a meaningful portion of planned savings evaporates annually because of habit and poor workflow design.

Procurement leaders recognize the problem but have not contained it. A study from WBR Insights, ProcureCon, and SDI found 91% of them view maverick spend as a real challenge, with 39% calling it very significant, and 87% said it worsened over the prior year. Ardent Partners found world-class procurement teams achieve roughly 75% contract compliance, against an average closer to 59.5%, which confirms that meaningful improvement is achievable for most organizations.

Slow Approval Chains Drive Most Maverick Spending

Approval chains are the single biggest cause of maverick spend. A team facing a tight deadline will not wait two weeks while a purchase order moves through four layers of sign-off. They contact the supplier they already know, the one who ships same-day, and compliance takes the hit. Ramp's research identifies the specific behaviors inside that pattern: intentional workarounds where someone decides the approval chain is too slow or unclear, purchases made under pressure with paperwork treated as an afterthought, and approval processes so inconsistent that employees stop trying to follow them.

Decentralized purchasing compounds the problem. When multiple teams each hold their own purchasing authority with no shared visibility across them, duplicate orders and off-contract buys accumulate without anyone recognizing the overlap. Corporate credit cards are the softest point in the system: without preapproval requirements or real spending controls attached, a purchase clears before any policy check can occur.

Trustpair's research frames lengthy internal processes as something that actively pushes employees toward workarounds. When the compliant path takes three times longer than the alternative, most employees take the alternative, and that is a process design failure rather than an employee compliance failure.

Employees Don't Know or Follow Policy

A survey of high-performing companies cited by Kodiak Hub found that 67% of procurement leaders named a lack of employee understanding of, or respect for, procurement policy as the single biggest driver of maverick spend. Two distinct problems sit under that finding and require different solutions. The unintentional version occurs when an employee does not know a preferred supplier list exists or does not realize a purchase order is required for a particular category. The intentional version is a cultural issue: some employees view procurement rules as needlessly rigid and bypass them deliberately, which signals that procurement is perceived as an obstacle rather than a service.

Poor training keeps this cycle running. A policy document that nobody reads is not a control. Existing supplier relationships are a softer cause: someone who has worked with the same vendor for years may continue buying from that vendor even after it leaves the approved list, out of familiarity rather than defiance. A confusing process generates more accidental bypasses, and a culture that never explains the reasoning behind a rule produces more employees who quietly decide the rule does not apply to their situation.

SaaS and Shadow AI Are Growing Fast

Software is the fastest-growing category of maverick spend. A Gartner report found that nearly 40% of SaaS spending goes completely unmonitored, with a large share of purchases occurring without finance or IT involvement. More than 30% of SaaS licenses go barely used or unused at all, according to CFO Dive, and off-contract licenses are the least likely to be reviewed or cancelled, so the waste compounds subscription by subscription.

Zylo's 2026 SaaS Management Index shows that expensed apps make up just 3.7% of total SaaS spending but account for 45% of all applications in use. Of those expensed apps, 59% carry a "Poor" or "Low" security rating, and they cost organizations nearly two million dollars a year on average once totaled. ChatGPT ranked 14th among expensed apps in 2023 and first in 2025. Zylo's data shows AI-native app spending rose 108% on average across 2025, and nearly 400% at large enterprises.

Shadow AI takes several forms: micro-subscriptions buried in expense reports, API charges billed to corporate cards, and AI features bundled into SaaS tiers a company already pays for. All three move past standard controls without much resistance because none resemble a purchase order. Suplari's AI Readiness in Procurement 2026 benchmark found that a large majority of procurement professionals use AI tools regularly, yet only a small minority work somewhere with an enforced AI governance policy, leaving most people using AI tools with sensitive supplier and contract data in hand and no enforced rules governing that use.

What Maverick Spending Actually Costs Organizations

Fragmented spend across off-contract vendors prevents procurement from consolidating volume, which eliminates the pricing leverage that volume would otherwise provide. That compounds the direct savings leakage described above, deal by deal over time.

Data quality is a less visible consequence. When accounts payable is full of off-contract charges, the spend analytics used for category strategy, budgeting, and supplier negotiations are built on numbers that nobody fully trusts. Decisions made on unreliable data create further misalignment downstream. Supplier relationships suffer as well: Esker's research shows that consistent off-contract buying signals to preferred vendors that the company's volume commitment was never reliable, which puts future pricing and service levels at risk, since those vendors negotiated their discounts against an assumed volume that maverick spend erodes.

ESG and fraud exposure round out the consequences. Suppliers brought in outside the vetting process may not meet the environmental, labor, or quality standards a company has publicly committed to, and that gap typically becomes visible only years later. The ACFE's 2024 Report to the Nations found organizations lose close to 5% of annual revenue to fraud each year, with maverick spend a consistent contributor. Employee fraud through expenses accounts for more than 21% of all fraud at small companies, and unauthorized purchasing can trigger regulatory penalties wherever vendor vetting requirements apply.

Detecting Maverick Spend Before It Compounds

Detection starts with records a company already holds: expense reports flagged for out-of-policy items, card statements with unrecognized charges, and vendor invoices showing duplicates or off-contract purchases. Several patterns in transaction data indicate a problem. Purchases that cluster just under an approval threshold suggest someone is avoiding a limit intentionally. Unusual one-time vendors appearing in the ledger deserve review. New recurring charges to vendors outside the preferred list, particularly SaaS subscriptions, require active monitoring because they renew automatically unless someone specifically investigates.

Formal spend analysis cross-references invoices, card statements, and other financial records to map actual purchases against what policy allows, and it consistently reveals gaps that were invisible before anyone looked. Technology accelerates this process: Ramp reports that dashboards and rules-based alerts catch anomalies faster than manual review, and automated expense systems can flag noncompliant purchases in real time so finance can intervene before a payment clears.

Hackett's 2025 research provides a useful benchmark: top-performing procurement teams lost 60% less in savings to off-contract buying than their peers. A procurement team reporting zero maverick spend is almost certainly failing to detect it, since zero is rarely accurate and usually indicates a visibility gap rather than genuine compliance.

Prevention Starts With Fixing the Process

Increasing penalties for maverick buyers without changing the process that produced the behavior will not work, because the workaround remains faster than the compliant path regardless of how many policy reminders are issued. The objective is to make the compliant path the easier path so that employees follow it without having to weigh the options.

On the process side, research from Ramp and Trustpair identifies several changes that matter. Simplifying approval workflows and reducing sign-off layers for routine, low-risk purchases removes the friction that pushes employees toward workarounds. Building a legitimate expedited lane for urgent purchases gives employees an approved option when time is a constraint. Connecting purchasing, receiving, and invoicing through a procure-to-pay system eliminates the structural invisibility that allows maverick spend to accumulate undetected. Making the preferred supplier catalog easy to locate and use matters as much as streamlining approvals, since friction in finding the right vendor produces the same outcome as friction in getting the purchase approved.

On the culture side, Ramp's research points to writing procurement policy in plain language and distributing it to the employees making purchasing decisions, not just to procurement staff. Training should explain the financial and operational consequences of off-contract buying, because employees who understand why a rule exists comply with it more consistently than those who see only the rule itself. Documenting clearly who can initiate a purchase, who approves it, and at what dollar thresholds removes the ambiguity that generates unintentional maverick spend, and it requires no new technology to implement.