How to reduce maverick spend and enforce budgets

Last updated: August 2026

Financial leakage rarely happens all at once. Instead, it occurs silently through unauthorised, out-of-policy purchasing known as maverick spend, which presents a significant challenge. 

Industry analysis frequently tracks the impact of maverick purchases, with benchmarks from The Hackett Group showing that organisations routinely lose between 10% and 20% of their targeted financial savings directly to maverick purchases.

In this guide, we look into what maverick spend is, how to reduce it, and how enforcing budgets using modern payment cards and spend management platforms can provide guardrails and protection in real-time.

What is maverick spend?

Maverick spend encompasses any business purchase an employee makes outside of established procurement procedures, workflows, and corporate policies. This includes buying goods or services from unapproved suppliers, bypassing structured purchase order (PO) approvals, or disregarding pre-negotiated corporate supplier contracts.

Whether an employee uses a personal credit card to buy an off-contract software subscription or sources office supplies from an unauthorised online retailer, these transactions occur completely outside the line of sight of your finance department.

Other types of spend

Tail spend

Tail spend is the expected portion of spend that goes toward low-cost items, like office supplies and replacement cables. While finance teams expect these routine outlays, they should still review them regularly to minimise unnecessary costs.

On-the-spot purchases

On some occasions, employees might need to make short-term or one-off purchases. These are often for single items or in a time-sensitive situation.

Finance teams struggle to control these unplanned outlays because employees complete them without reviewing spend policies.

While tail spend and on-the-spot purchases are both typically low volume, the main difference is that colleagues buy maverick items completely outside established procurement policies and preferred suppliers.

Why is it important to control maverick spend?

Maverick spend doesn’t announce itself as a single dramatic action. Instead, it accumulates silently across departments until the small spends add up to a significant and unexpected gap in budgets.

As the illustrative table above shows, there is potential for unaccounted spend and the resulting shadow work to have a significant impact on project costs if they are not carefully managed. To see how much unmanaged spend might be costing your company, try out our spend management ROI calculator.

• Lost savings. When teams bypass established contracts, the company loses pre-negotiated volume discounts. Businesses routinely miss out on 63% of temporary market opportunities simply because they take too long to classify rogue spending data and finalise contracts with preferred vendors.

• Breach of contract penalties. If employees are buying from elsewhere, there is a risk of failing to meet minimum purchase volume commitments.

• Reputational and ESG risk. Purchasing from unvetted suppliers who don't meet the company's environmental, social, or governance (ESG) standards could expose the company to compliance failures.

• Accounting bottlenecks. Because finance can't match the maverick spend to a purchase order, it creates an end-of-month procedural bottleneck of avoidable tasks. This contributes to the broader problem of shadow work, which costs UK businesses an estimated £95 billion a year in lost productivity.

What causes maverick spend within an organisation?

To change maverick spending habits, it’s essential to understand why team members choose to bypass the system. The reasons are rarely malicious and often come from an eagerness to avoid delays, without realising the impact their actions are likely to have on budgets.

Confusing or slow processes

If procurement tools are slow or hard to use, it can become a point of frustration for employees, especially if they are feeling the pressure of deadlines. “Procurement processes are rarely dodged with bad intentions. Employees simply work around the clunky systems that get in the way of their tasks.” explains Marc Beerhorst, Senior Director, Spend Revenue.

Fragmented organisational structures

Relying on decentralised purchasing frequently leads to financial leakage. Without a unified system, individual teams effectively operate in silos. Benchmark US data from an ECBIS report found that traditional financial legacy systems keep roughly 68% of actionable intelligence trapped in silos.

Without a centralised system, departments and individuals may purchase tools and subscriptions autonomously, missing opportunities for enterprise-wide savings on licenses, making transparent budget management impossible. 

Knowledge and visibility gaps

Sometimes employees genuinely believe they are saving the company money by finding a lower price online, not realising the hidden costs of managing unvetted suppliers. 

If finance leaders don't provide clear guidance on preferred products and suppliers, teams may not realise a pre-negotiated contract exists.

How to conduct a maverick spend analysis

Before tightening your spend controls, run a full analysis to pinpoint exactly where budget leakage occurs. Creating a clear picture, as a baseline, is key to spotting future maverick spend early.

Consolidate your data

Fragmentation between systems and processes is where most maverick spend is hidden. Begin by gathering data from multiple sources, including credit cards, enterprise resource planning systems (ERPs), invoices, and spreadsheets.

Expert tip: Don’t ignore personal card claims. While these are often for small amounts, recurring payments and patterns could help to locate unapproved software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscriptions.

Filter non-PO invoices

Sort consolidated data to remove duplicates and then filter by purchase order (PO) status. High volumes of non-PO invoices are a clear indicator of rogue purchasing.

Expert tip: Calculate your "PO-to-invoice" ratio by department. A high rate of invoices could help to locate areas where current procurement processes are ineffective.

Audit low-value tail spend

Financial leakage often occurs in tail spend areas around office equipment and tool subscriptions. Focus your attention on these areas over higher-spend categories.

Identify supplier redundancies and opportunities

Spot instances where departments use multiple suppliers in the same space. This redundancy usually indicates that your business isn't maximising the benefits of having preferred suppliers.

Expert tip: Redundancy means your business is actively missing out on corporate volume discounts. Consolidating into a single preferred supplier contract immediately unlocks greater negotiation leverage.

How to reduce maverick spend in procurement

Awareness and closer monitoring of cash flow and expenditure require a balance of clear policies, employee communication, and effective financial management tools.

Shift to centralised purchasing

Ensure that all business purchases flow through a single, integrated spend management platform. This helps finance teams spot and minimise rogue spend, while maintaining a real-time overview of spend to ensure tail spend is monitored, and bulk-rate opportunities from key suppliers are not missed.

Create clear, documented spending policies

Procurement policies can quickly become complicated, so you must streamline them into clear guidelines. By setting out explicit expectations, you directly address the core causes of unintended maverick spend.

Outline key information, like:

• Who should make purchases

• Which suppliers are mandatory

• Spending limits for each type of purchase.

Commit to team training

Help your workforce understand that procurement rules are not just about compliance, but are protecting the financial health of the business and reducing pressure on finance teams.

Run training sessions to show how to reduce maverick spend and enforce budgets effectively using approved systems. Providing explanations alongside expectations can help to improve understanding and foster a culture change around maverick spend.

Deploy corporate and virtual cards

While a clear policy and understanding will help, the practical implementation is where maverick spending can be actively reduced. Providing teams with payment tools that have pre-set spending limits and supplier rules by department establishes clear guardrails to ensure maverick spend is no longer easier than sticking to policies.

Why do traditional corporate cards fail to prevent spending leakage?

Traditional corporate cards operate reactively rather than proactively. While they can provide a line of credit, they do not have embedded guardrails or real-time controls to manage spend types. 

In many cases, finance teams may only spot unapproved purchases weeks later when the monthly statement arrives. By then, the funds are gone, and your team must spend additional hours on the detective work of chasing down receipts and compiling expenses.

How managed cards can eliminate maverick spend

Transitioning to modern digital payment infrastructure is one of the fastest and easiest ways to eliminate procurement leakage as compliance becomes automatic. The operational benefits are stark. 

The ECBIS’ report found that organisations moving away from manual tracking realise a 304% increase in real-time spend visibility, alongside a 722% increase in their accuracy for predicting future savings opportunities.

Real-time tracking

Real-time tracking is a standout feature of smart corporate cards in managing maverick spending. Instant transaction notifications and easy-to-use data analytics provide procurement departments with company-wide spend visibility for each purchase as it happens.

This transparency allows your company to monitor and assess expenses in real-time, improving collaboration, streamlining the procurement-to-pay process, and allowing quicker responses to irregular or unauthorised spend.

Spend insights

Beyond tracking amounts, smart corporate cards capture valuable insights into spending patterns and supplier usage. By analysing this data, Perk’s platform can help finance teams easily identify trends, budget, and negotiate contracts or discounts with preferred suppliers.

Data-driven insights support long-term planning, revealing cost-saving opportunities and optimisation areas, making corporate cards an essential tool for financial leaders focused on cost reduction and strategic sourcing.

Pre-set spending limits

Perk empowers finance teams to allocate funds precisely using pre-defined spending limits, ensuring each transaction aligns with departmental budgets. By capping expenses per card or transaction, every transaction contributes to broader financial objectives.

Instant reporting and reconciliation

Instant reporting tools allow finance teams to track expenses in real time. Automatically logged and categorised transactions provide up-to-date records that reduce manual work and support both compliance and financial accuracy, minimising uncontrolled spending and ensuring adherence to purchasing policies.

Supplier-specific restrictions

Supplier-specific restrictions let finance teams assign cards for exclusive use with approved suppliers, such as preferred software providers or marketing platforms, aligning spend with procurement policy priorities. These restrictions improve budgetary control and ensure funds are directed towards strategic projects, preventing unauthorised purchases.

Gain total control over your business spend with Perk

Controlling maverick spend does not mean you have to slow your business down. The smartest organisations manage cash flow by deploying an intelligent platform that protects budgets quietly in the background.

Perk’s spend management platform simplifies company spend across your entire business. By combining corporate cards with our intelligent all-in-one platform, you can eliminate procurement leakage and free your finance team to focus on real work with real impact.

Our Expense Processing solution uses AI to automate the entire expense journey, from capturing receipt data to matching claims to transactions and highlighting policy conflicts automatically to prevent duplicate payments and fraud.

With advanced features for real-time visibility, customisable controls, and seamless integrations, Perk enables businesses to easily manage unpredictable spending areas more efficiently, supporting strategic sourcing, compliance, and improved supplier management. 

Book a demo to take control of your maverick spend with Perk’s powerful, customisable solution designed to bring visibility, efficiency, and compliance to your business expenses.