Every procurement team has a number it does not like to talk about: the share of spend that never passes through procurement at all. Marketing signs its own agency contracts, IT renews licences directly, plant managers order spare parts from whoever answers the phone. This is maverick spend — and in most organisations it quietly eats 10 to 30 percent of indirect budgets.
Why maverick buying happens
It is rarely malice. Stakeholders buy outside the process because the process is slower, harder or less pleasant than going around it. The supplier they know answers in an hour; the procurement portal takes three approvals and a week. Maverick spend is usually a symptom of a procurement function that is harder to use than the alternative.
What it actually costs
- Money: off-contract purchases ignore negotiated prices and volume rebates — paying list price while a framework agreement sits unused.
- Risk: no vetting, no contract terms, no data processing agreements. The cheapest way to discover a compliance gap is an audit; the most expensive is an incident.
- Position: every euro that leaks around a framework agreement weakens your volume argument at renewal time.
How to bring it under control
1. Measure it first. Pull twelve months of accounts payable data and match invoices against contracts and purchase orders. The gap is your maverick baseline — and your business case.
2. Make the right way the easy way. Catalogues, pre-approved suppliers and a requisition that takes two minutes beat any policy memo. If compliance requires heroism, you will not get it.
3. Close the loop with finance. A simple “no PO, no pay” rule, enforced by accounts payable, does more than a year of training sessions. Start with the top categories, not everything at once.
4. Talk to your top offenders. The ten people who buy the most outside the process usually have reasons. Fix their problems and they become your best ambassadors.
Indirect categories are where maverick spend lives. Our Indirect Procurement Masterclass dedicates a module to demand management and compliance without bureaucracy.
