What Is Maverick Spend?

Quick answer: Maverick spend is any purchase made outside a company's approved suppliers, contracts or procurement process. It happens when someone buys what they need through the fastest available route rather than the compliant one, whether that's a personal card, an unapproved vendor or a request that never touches procurement at all.

Most procurement teams don't lose visibility over spend all at once. It leaks out a purchase at a time. A marketing lead signs up for a tool on a company card because the intake form takes longer to find than the free trial does. A new starter buys a laptop stand from a supplier nobody's vetted because nobody told them there was a catalogue. None of this is malicious. It's just people solving a problem in front of them, without knowing (or caring) what happens to the data on the other side.

What Causes Maverick Spend?

Maverick spend is almost always a symptom of friction, not intent. People go around procurement because going through procurement is slower or harder than the alternative. A few patterns show up again and again:

• No easy front door. If the "right way to buy" lives on an intranet page nobody reads, employees find their own way.
• No visible preferred suppliers. Without a catalogue of pre-approved vendors and pricing, every purchase becomes a fresh decision.
• Onboarding gaps. New hires and teams in decentralised functions often never learn what the process is in the first place.
• Slow approvals. When getting sign-off takes longer than the deadline allows, people find a workaround and ask forgiveness later.

How Do You Calculate the Maverick Spend Rate?

The maverick spend rate is the share of total spend that happens outside approved channels, expressed as a percentage. The calculation is straightforward: divide the value of off-contract or off-policy purchases by total spend, then multiply by 100.

There's no single agreed benchmark, because measurement methodology varies between organisations. Ardent Partners research puts average maverick spend at around 30% of total spend, while top-performing procurement teams keep compliance above 90%, meaning their maverick spend rate sits in the single digits. The Hackett Group has found that maverick buying costs organisations between 5% and 16% of targeted savings a year, largely because volume that should have gone through negotiated contracts ends up at list price instead.

Maverick spend is often confused with tail spend, but they're not the same thing. Tail spend is the long list of small, fragmented purchases spread across many suppliers, whether or not they follow policy. Maverick spend is specifically the portion that bypasses approved suppliers and circumvents policy and approval processes. A purchase can be tail spend and fully compliant, or it can be maverick spend at any value.

Why Does Maverick Spend Matter for Finance and Procurement?

Maverick spend costs more than the line item suggests. Every purchase that skips procurement also skips the negotiated rate, the due diligence check and the audit trail that goes with it. For finance, that means spend forecasts built on incomplete data. For procurement, it means suppliers nobody has assessed for financial or security risk sitting on the books. For risk and compliance teams preparing for an audit, it means gaps and vulnerabilities they find out about at the worst possible time.

The cost compounds with scale. A team spending a few thousand pounds off-contract each month is an inefficiency. The same behaviour repeated across hundreds of employees and dozens of departments becomes a structural gap in spend control, and it's rarely visible until someone goes looking for it.

How Do You Reduce Maverick Spend?

The most effective fix isn't a stricter policy. It’s making the compliant path the easiest one. Employees don't choose maverick spend because they enjoy breaking rules. They choose it because it's easier than the alternative, so the alternative needs to stop being harder.

That starts with giving employees a single front door. If people only need to remember one way to interface with procurement, they'll use it, especially when it lives inside the tools they already work in, like Slack and Teams. Nobody has to hunt down a portal or reread a policy doc. They describe what they need in the place they already spend their day.

From there, intake does the thinking. Omnea's guided buying and catalogue considers the request as it's typed and routes the employee to pre-approved items and existing contracts first, so they land on an approved supplier before they ever think about buying elsewhere. TeamViewer used this approach to keep software spend under control by cutting unnecessary new vendor introductions and driving supplier consolidation, then extended it to hardware requests, bringing an additional 30% of purchasing activity under management on top of their existing SaaS and services spend.

When something genuinely new is needed, the same flow guides the employee through intake rather than turning them away. That process can be AI-assisted too, autofilling the details employees shouldn't be expected to know, like cost centre and entity, so raising a compliant request takes minimal time.

Every step of that flow should be judged on one thing: simplicity. The moment the compliant path asks more of the employee than the workaround does, maverick spend comes back. Reach plc, the UK's largest commercial news publisher, made the compliant path the default this way and cut maverick spend from 30% to 5% across a supplier base of 3,000+ vendors.