Maverick spend: How to find and control it

You negotiated contracts, lined up preferred suppliers, and locked in the pricing. On paper, the purchasing process is under control. Then the spend reports come in, and money is still leaking out the sides: a rush order placed on a personal card, a one-off purchase from a supplier nobody approved, a subscription renewed outside the agreement. None of it was flagged, and most of it looked reasonable to the person who bought it.

Maverick spend is the gap between the procurement policies you set and the purchases people actually make. Left unchecked, maverick spend can erode the cost savings your contracts were supposed to protect.

This guide walks through what maverick spend is, why it happens, how to spot it in your own data, and how you can bring it back within policy without slowing your team down.

What is maverick spend?

Maverick spend is any purchasing that happens outside your agreed contracts, preferred suppliers, or purchasing policy, even when the item bought is legitimate and needed. It's defined by how the purchase was made, not by whether the purchase was wrong.

You may also see it called rogue spend or off-contract spend. The labels differ, but they all point at the same thing: a transaction that skipped the agreed path.

Most maverick spend is well-intentioned convenience buying by people trying to do their jobs, not deliberate rule-breaking. It can happen when someone needs an item quickly, can't find the preferred option, and buys the thing that solves their problem. It's not a fraud problem but a compliance-and-visibility one.

Maverick spend vs. tail spend

Maverick spend and tail spend overlap, but they aren't the same thing. One describes where a purchase sits in your spend profile, while the other describes how the purchase was made.

Tail spend is the low-value, high-volume bottom of your spend curve: the many small purchases across countless suppliers that individually look trivial but add up.

Maverick spend is any purchase made off-contract or off-policy, which can happen anywhere on the curve, from a small desktop order to a large uncontracted commitment.

The two intersect because a lot of maverick spend hides inside the tail, where low-value ad hoc purchases are easier to make and easier to overlook.

Why maverick spend happens

Maverick spend usually happens when the compliant path is slower or harder than buying from an unapproved, more direct channel. When policy is unclear, preferred suppliers are hard to find, approvals drag, or nobody sees the purchase until the invoice lands, people may route around the process to get their work done.

The common triggers of maverick spend tend to include:

• Urgency: Someone needs an item today, and the approved route feels too slow to wait for.

• Catalog gaps: The preferred supplier doesn't stock the item, or the buyer can't tell which option is preferred.

• Unclear policy: The rules exist but are not surfaced at the moment of purchase, so buyers act on their own judgment.

• Decentralized buying: Purchasing is spread across teams and locations with no shared view, so off-contract habits take hold unnoticed.

Procurement teams can close that gap with digital controls. In recent McKinsey analysis, the share of respondents calling digital enablement a core priority jumped to 24% in a 2024 webinar poll, up from just 2% a year earlier. Teams are moving to design the compliant path rather than police it after the fact.

How to find maverick spend

You can find maverick spend in your own order and spend data by comparing what was bought against your approved contracts, preferred suppliers, and policy, then flagging what falls outside. The goal isn't to flag every transaction that lacks a contract reference, but to identify validated noncompliant spend that bypasses an available agreement, approved process, supplier, channel, or authorization requirement.

Many teams start by building a complete view of addressable third-party spend. They combine purchase-order, invoice, accounts-payable, purchasing-card, travel-and-expense, supplier-master, contract, catalog, and approval data. A purchase order-only view can miss important maverick activity, especially card, invoice-only, and reimbursement spend that lacks proper contract management.

Procurement teams often use a workable method that looks like this:

• Define the rules: Document what counts as on-contract, contract-eligible, off-contract, off-policy, approved exception, unapproved supplier, price variance, and channel bypass.

• Consolidate and cleanse spend data: Standardize supplier names, map parent-child supplier relationships, classify categories, and reconcile transaction data with contract and policy records.

• Match purchases to approved sources: Compare each transaction with eligible contracts, approved suppliers, contract price lists, approved catalogs, required channels, and documented exceptions.

• Validate the flags: Remove legitimate exceptions, non-addressable spend, unmatched supplier records, expired or incomplete contract data, and purchases outside contract scope before labeling a transaction maverick.

• Quantify and prioritize: Measure validated maverick spend, contract compliance, transaction volume, supplier fragmentation, recurrence, and potential value leakage by category, business unit, site, requester, and supplier.

• Fix the cause and monitor recurrence: Determine whether the issue is missing contract coverage, inadequate catalogs, poor approved-channel experience, slow approvals, bad master data, training gaps, or intentional policy bypass. Assign owners and track reductions over time.

Visibility should come first, and it's what procurement leaders say they want. In Deloitte's 2025 Global Chief Procurement Officer Survey, 64% of procurement leaders placed greater visibility among their priorities.

This is one place a tool can shorten the work through automated spend analysis. Spend Visibility (a Prime Business feature) can support analysis of purchasing activity conducted through Amazon Business. It provides dashboards and visual analysis for spend, orders, policy compliance, suppliers, users, categories, and supplier-diversity views. You can use it as one component of the analysis and pair it with ERP, accounts payable, contract, and supplier-master data to assess enterprise-wide maverick spend and contract compliance.

How to bring spend under control

You can reduce maverick spend by making the compliant path the easy path. When the right supplier is surfaced at the point of purchase, policy is clear, spending limits are in place, and approvals apply only to the exceptions, most buyers stay on contract.

The objective is to protect your strategic sourcing efforts by making routine, contracted purchases simple and automatic while applying review to higher-risk, higher-value, restricted, or genuinely exceptional purchases. Four controls can do most of the work:

• Define the policy in plain terms. Tell buyers which suppliers, contracts, categories, channels, and purchase thresholds apply to their purchases, and explain the approved exception path when they cannot use them.

• Guide buyers at the point of purchase. Surface preferred suppliers and products in the buying workflow instead of relying on users to remember policy, contract numbers, or approved-item lists.

• Set budgets and purchasing authority. Assign budget thresholds or allocations to appropriate buyer groups and require review when a purchase would exceed available funds or delegated authority.

• Route exceptions through risk-based approval. Keep routine, low-risk contracted purchases moving quickly. Require justification and approval for restricted products, nonpreferred suppliers, off-contract purchases, new suppliers, or transactions above a defined threshold.

These controls work best when the underlying contract coverage, supplier availability, catalog content, product data, and approval service levels are maintained. If compliant options are unavailable, expensive, difficult to find, or slow to obtain, buyers will have a legitimate incentive to work around the process.

The Hackett Group reports that its Digital World Class procurement organizations reduce maverick buying and contract noncompliance, resulting in 60% less savings lost than peers.

For Amazon Business purchases, administrators can use Guided Buying to prefer, restrict, or block specific products and sellers and to configure approval workflows:

• Preferred policies direct buyers toward approved options.

• Restricted policies can display a warning or require approval.

• Blocked policies prevent purchases from designated products or sellers.

Budget Management can complement these controls by setting purchasing controls and allocations for buyer groups. These controls apply to purchases made through the Amazon Business account, and many teams integrate them with their organization's broader ERP, contract, card, expense, and approval controls for enterprise-wide spend governance.

Guided Buying and Approvals are available to all Amazon Business customers, with additional buying-policy capabilities available to Prime Business members.

Turn maverick spend into managed spend

Maverick spend isn't a problem to police so much as one to design around. The pattern that works for many teams is simple: find it in your own data, make the compliant path the easy path, and keep watching as contracts, suppliers, and teams change. Do that and off-contract buying can become a managed part of your overall procurement strategy and spend management approach.

When you're ready to make the compliant path the default your team reaches for first, getting started with Amazon Business Guided Buying is a practical next step.