Maverick Spend Is a Symptom, Not a Problem — Here's What's Really Broken

A product manager needs a $4,000/year analytics tool. She submits a request to procurement. Two weeks later, she hasn't heard back. Her team's quarterly deadline is approaching. She puts it on her corporate card. Procurement finds out three months later during a spend review and flags it as "maverick spend." The product manager is frustrated. Procurement is frustrated. And the organization just paid list price for a tool they could have negotiated 30% off through an existing enterprise agreement.

The real cost of off-contract purchasing

Maverick spend — purchases made outside established procurement channels and contracts — typically costs organizations 12–18% more per transaction compared to managed spend, according to Hyperbots' 2026 analysis. For a company with $80M in annual procurement spend where 15% is maverick, that's $1.4M–$2.2M in excess cost annually. But the financial impact understates the operational damage: fragmented supplier relationships, compliance gaps, duplicate contracts, and lost negotiating leverage.

The Hackett Group's 2025 data shows that best-in-class procurement organizations have maverick spend rates below 5%, while average organizations sit at 15–20%. That 10–15 percentage point gap isn't explained by stricter policies — it's explained by better processes.

Why employees go around procurement

1. Procurement is too slow

The most common reason for maverick spending is simple: the procurement process takes too long relative to the business need. When a standard purchase request takes 2–3 weeks to process and the requester needs the tool or service this week, they find a workaround. This isn't a discipline failure — it's a rational response to a process that doesn't match the speed of business operations.

2. The process is opaque

Requesters submit a form and hear nothing for days. They don't know if their request is in queue, under review, stuck in approvals, or lost entirely. Without visibility into status, they can't plan around procurement timelines and default to self-service purchasing when deadlines approach.

3. Existing contracts aren't discoverable

In many organizations, employees don't know what contracts and preferred suppliers already exist. A marketing coordinator buying freelance design services doesn't realize procurement has a master services agreement with a design agency that offers 40% lower rates. The knowledge exists in procurement's systems but isn't accessible to the people making day-to-day purchasing decisions.

Fixing the root cause, not the symptom

• Speed: Reduce standard request processing from weeks to days through automated routing and parallel approvals
• Visibility: Give requesters real-time status tracking so they can see exactly where their request stands
• Discoverability: Surface existing contracts and preferred suppliers at the point of request — before the employee goes off-contract
• Guided buying: For common purchase categories, provide a self-service catalog with pre-approved options that don't require a full procurement cycle
• Threshold flexibility: Allow low-value, low-risk purchases to flow through lightweight approval paths instead of the full sourcing process

The bottom line

Maverick spend is procurement's way of telling you that your processes don't match the speed and accessibility that business users need. Cracking down with stricter policies without fixing the underlying friction just pushes maverick behavior further underground. The organizations with the lowest maverick spend rates aren't the ones with the strictest policies — they're the ones where the compliant path is genuinely faster and easier than going around it.

More from the Aurevity blog