Maverick spending: What it is and how to control it
- What is maverick spending?
- What are the consequences of maverick spending?
- Common causes of maverick spending
- How to identify maverick spending in your organization
- 5 steps to control and prevent maverick spending
- Best practices for long-term spend management
- Case study: How Red Antler addressed maverick spending with Ramp
- Rein in maverick spending with Ramp
Picture this: A marketing manager urgently needs a new design tool and charges it to the company card without looping in procurement. One swipe, multiplied across teams, can quietly drain budget and weaken controls.
Maverick spending, also called rogue spending, is any purchase made outside your approved procurement processes and established, approved vendor relationships. When employees bypass contracts and approvals, costs rise, compliance risk increases, and visibility into spending drops.
What is maverick spending?
Unlike approved procurement, which follows requisitions, approvals, and purchases from contracted suppliers, maverick spending skips those safeguards. It often shows up in small, quick buys, last-minute “emergency” orders, and recurring tools that teams adopt without going through the process.
Common examples across departments include IT buying software licenses directly on a credit card, marketing signing up for unapproved ad platforms, and operations reordering supplies from non-preferred vendors. Each choice may seem harmless on its own, but together they undermine pricing agreements, reporting accuracy, and accountability.
What are the consequences of maverick spending?
Maverick spending might seem harmless in isolated instances, but its cumulative effect can significantly impact your business's financial health and operational efficiency:
Direct financial costs
- Increased procurement costs from lost volume pricing and negotiated discounts
- Duplicate purchases and redundant subscriptions that inflate budgets
- Budget overruns and forecasting issues when untracked spend slips into reports
Indirect business risks
- Weakened supplier relationships when teams bypass preferred vendors
- Reduced quality control if off-contract items don’t meet standards
- Compliance exposure when purchases skip policy and regulatory checkpoints
- Operational friction from unexpected deliveries, mismatched invoices, and ad-hoc workflows
Common causes of maverick spending
Most maverick spending isn’t malicious. It often happens when processes feel slow, policies aren’t clear, or teams don’t have visibility into the right purchasing path. Understanding why rogue spending occurs is essential for developing effective prevention strategies.
Employee perspective
- Intentional workarounds when approval steps feel too slow or complex
- Urgency that encourages “I’ll fix it later” purchases
- Unintentional mistakes when expectations aren’t clear or reinforced
Organizational factors
- Complex or inconsistent approval chains that push teams to bypass the system
- Limited visibility when purchasing, receiving, and invoicing aren’t connected by a modern procure-to-pay (P2P) system
- Decentralized purchasing authority without consistent oversight
- Communication and training gaps—e.g., policies exist, but reminders, leadership support, and thoughtful change management are missing
How to identify maverick spending in your organization
Spotting unauthorized purchases starts with the records you already have. Review expense reports for out-of-policy items, scan card statements for unfamiliar charges, and audit vendor invoices for duplicates or off-contract buys.
| Indicator | What it means | Suggested control |
|---|---|---|
| Purchases just under approval limits | Attempts to bypass controls | Tighten limits, enable pre-approvals, add alerts |
| Unusual or one-time vendors | Off-contract purchasing | Route through procurement, enforce preferred vendor list |
| New recurring charges to non-preferred | Unauthorized subscriptions | Centralize SaaS reviews, cancel or migrate to approved vendors |
Using technology for detection
Dashboards and rules-based alerts surface anomalies faster than manual review. Automated expense management systems can flag non-compliant purchases in real time so finance can intervene before reimbursement or payment.
5 steps to control and prevent maverick spending
These steps combine policy, accountability, and the right tools so you can curb unauthorized purchases without slowing teams down.
1. Define clear policies
Write straightforward guidelines that spell out approved vendors, purchase limits, and authorization paths. Make them easy to find, keep them current, and reference them often so expectations stay top of mind.
2. Clarify roles and responsibilities
Document who can initiate purchases, who can approve expenses, and at what thresholds. A shared playbook removes ambiguity and creates natural accountability across departments.
3. Educate and train employees
Explain the “why,” not just the rules. Provide quick-reference guides for common purchases, run short refreshers during tool or policy changes, and recognize teams that consistently follow the process.
4. Use an expense management system
Modern expense management software automates approvals, enforces policy, and centralizes vendor data. Real-time visibility helps you spot issues before they turn into spend leakage and reduces manual follow-up for finance.
5. Track spending activity
Schedule regular reviews to surface policy exceptions, coach teams that need support, and refine thresholds, vendor lists, and workflows. Treat findings as inputs to improve the process, not just as audit artifacts.
Best practices for long-term spend management
Sustained control comes from a steady operating rhythm supported by regular analysis, strong supplier relationships, policy upkeep, and clear accountability. Best practices include:
- Regular business spend analysis and reporting to surface trends, off-policy purchases, and duplicate tools
- Ongoing vendor relationship management with preferred suppliers to protect negotiated pricing and service levels
- Periodic policy reviews and updates when teams, tools, or thresholds change
- Clear ownership and training so new hires and frequent purchasers know the correct path to buy
- A culture of financial responsibility supported by leadership and reinforced in day-to-day decisions
Measuring success
Use a focused scorecard to show whether your controls are working and where to tune the process. Things to measure include:
- Maverick spend rate: The share of total spend that bypasses policy
- Policy compliance rate: The percentage of purchases that follow approvals and vendor lists
- Preferred vendor utilization: The portion of spend with contracted suppliers
- Approval cycle time: How long requests take from submission to decision
- Savings captured from on-contract purchasing: Discounts realized, duplicate subscriptions eliminated, and avoided costs over time
Case study: How Red Antler addressed maverick spending with Ramp
The creative production team at brand marketing agency Red Antler made hundreds of monthly purchases to support their operations. However, they tracked these expenses manually.
This meant three producers spent hours each month reconciling spreadsheets. The high volume of transactions and reliance on manual reconciliation led to a significant number of undetected, unauthorized expenses.
Red Antler partnered with Ramp to address this and gain control over employees’ designated company credit cards. They were able to easily control purchases in real time with custom-defined controls, and Ramp’s expense management dashboard made it easy to visualize the entire team’s spend.
As a result, Red Antler:
- Reduced maverick purchases and optimized their spend
- Reclaimed more than 80 hours a month
- Gained much more clarity on spending patterns organization-wide
Rein in maverick spending with Ramp
Ramp's comprehensive expense management software provides the tools to prevent maverick spend before it happens. With automated policy enforcement, approval processes, and real-time visibility, you can gain control without sacrificing efficiency.
To help you get a handle on spending, Ramp can:
- Automate 3-way match: Get the ultimate protection against fraud and errors. Our automated 3-way match validates invoices against purchase orders and item receipts.
- Find savings opportunities: Gain complete visibility into spending to uncover savings on unused subscriptions, licenses, and memberships, eliminating unnecessary costs and reliance on outside accounting help
- Work with all your existing tools: Approve requests directly in Slack, review contracts with Ironclad, and sync or import purchase orders with NetSuite
Get started with a free interactive product demo.
FAQs
Maverick buying and maverick spending are synonyms. Both refer to purchases that don’t follow rules set by your business’s procurement department. Maverick spending can generally be avoided with the right expense management strategies.
Tail spend refers to small, low-value purchases that are often unmanaged but still within policy. Maverick spending is explicitly unauthorized spending that bypasses your approved procurement processes.
In a supply chain, maverick spending happens when teams make purchases outside approved vendors or contracts. This disrupts negotiated pricing, reduces visibility, and can cause inefficiencies across sourcing, logistics, and supplier management.
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