Spend management: What it is and how to improve it

In many organizations, procurement is a never-ending balancing act. While teams carefully negotiate major supplier contracts and capital expenses, up to 20 to 30 percent of expenses often fall into tail spend, or unmanaged expenses, leading to inefficiencies. 

This lack of visibility leads to budget overruns and increases the risk of compliance violations, duplicate purchases, and missed savings opportunities. Without a clear strategy, many organizations react to costs rather than control them. 

What’s needed is spend management, a proactive, holistic approach to directing, optimizing, and streamlining spend across your organization. It’s not just about cutting costs or improving cash flow; it’s about gaining clarity and making smarter decisions at every step of the purchasing process. 

According to Economist Impact’s 2025 The Procurement Imperative report, procurement teams are increasingly prioritizing internal and external collaboration to better support their organization’s vision and improve responsible purchasing and supplier innovation. The vast majority of C-suite leaders believe these efforts are strengthening both cost control and sustainability performance.

Your organization needs more than just basic budget tracking. It needs a system-wide approach to managing spend before it happens.

What is spend management?

Spend management refers to the strategies, processes, and technologies an organization uses to manage purchasing activities, from requisition to payment, with the goal of increasing visibility, operational efficiencies, and control over spend. Unlike traditional cost-cutting strategies, spend management is comprehensive and includes:

• Process control: Streamlining procurement workflows and approvals

• Analytics: Leveraging data to inform purchasing decisions

• Supplier management: Consolidating vendors and optimizing contracts

When implemented effectively, spend management helps organizations:

• Eliminate maverick or non-compliant purchasing

• Improve budget accuracy

• Enforce procurement policies across departments

• Unlock cost savings without compromising operational agility

   

Spend management vs. expense management

It can be easy to confuse spend management with expense management, but they serve different purposes:

• Spend management includes managing all types of procurement, from indirect purchases like office supplies to the strategic sourcing of raw materials. It counts company spending initiated by both employees and departments.

• Expense management, on the other hand, is primarily focused on tracking and reimbursing employee expenses, such as travel costs and meals during work trips. Companies often track these costs via expense reports. 

Spend management offers visibility before money is spent, allowing for proactive control rather than reconciling purchases after they occur.

Spend management vs. spend analysis

Managing spend also differs from analyzing it. Spend analysis involves collecting and evaluating historical purchasing data to uncover inefficiencies and opportunities. 

While spend analysis tells you what happened, spend management helps you decide what to do next. It’s the operational framework that turns analytical insights into tangible policies, workflows, and actions that improve procurement outcomes.

Why spend management matters now

The post-pandemic economy has changed how organizations buy:

• Cost pressures are rising due to inflation, labor shortages, and economic uncertainty.

• Supply chain volatility continues to disrupt forecasting and vendor reliability.

• Stakeholder and board expectations are increasing regarding transparency and responsibility in how organizations spend their money. 

According to the 2025 Deloitte Global Chief Procurement Officer Survey, organizations willing to invest in technology to improve performance are far more likely to outperform organizations that don’t across all procurement performance metrics. This includes:

• Cost savings

• Cost avoidance

• Internal stakeholder satisfaction

• Supplier performance

• Innovation enablement

   

Spend management strategy: Key components

An effective spend management strategy isn’t just about tools. It’s also about structure. Here are the key pillars organizations should focus on when building their spend management systems.

Real-time visibility and analytics

You can’t manage what you can’t see. Real-time, consolidated data enables decision-makers to track spending trends, spot anomalies, and create proactive policies. Without that visibility, purchasing decisions are made in the dark, leading to duplicated purchases, missed savings, and internal compliance issues.

Policy and compliance controls

Strong policy and approval workflows can empower your organization to guide employee spending without micromanaging. For example, setting spending limits by department or role or steering users toward preferred suppliers can reduce risk while maintaining flexibility. 

Supplier consolidation and sourcing efficiency

Buying from too many suppliers creates complexity, reduces spend leverage, and increases the likelihood of off-contract buying. Streamlining your vendor list to focus on pre-vetted, high-quality suppliers improves purchasing efficiency and strengthens negotiating power. 

Spend forecasting and optimization

Modern spend management software supports predictive analytics, allowing you to forecast purchasing needs based on historical data and trends. Automated tools can surface anomalies, suggest budget reallocations, and track spend performance against KPIs. 

Reporting and continuous improvement

Sustainable success comes from evaluating and building on insights. By measuring metrics like the percent of spend under management, policy compliance rate, and savings per category, you can continuously refine your strategy and demonstrate procurement’s value to your business. 

Common spend management challenges

While spend management has many benefits, it also comes with its share of challenges. Even with the right goals in place, many organizations struggle to implement effective strategies due to persistent pain points like the following.

Fragmented purchasing and maverick spend

When departments or individuals make purchases outside of approved systems or vendor lists—known as maverick spend—organizations lose control over pricing, quality, and compliance. This leads to inconsistent pricing, compliance issues, and budget overruns. 

Fragmented buying also weakens your negotiating power and makes it nearly impossible to enforce company-wide policies.

Solution: Implement centralized accounts, standardized approval workflows, and shared purchasing lists to curb rogue spending and improve compliance.

Limited data visibility

Without consolidated data, procurement leaders can’t easily see where and how teams spend. This lack of insight often stems from multiple disconnected systems (e.g., ERPs, procurement platforms, spreadsheets) or inconsistent data formats across departments or cost centers, making it difficult to identify waste or track against budget goals.

Solution: Use procurement solutions to unify data across systems, suppliers, and departments.

Manual processes and siloed teams

Manual, email-driven processes and a lack of coordination between procurement, finance, and department managers slow down approvals and increase the risk of errors. Common issues include:

• Paper-based workflows

• Delays in purchase approvals or invoice matching

• Conflicting priorities between finance teams (control) and departments (speed and flexibility)

   

These silos result in delayed purchases, frustrated employees, and limited ability to scale procurement as your organization grows.

Solution: Use cross-functional collaboration and process automation to enable faster, more accurate purchasing.

Difficulty enforcing compliance

Procurement policies only work if they’re followed, and many organizations struggle with enforcement. This is often due to:

• A lack of awareness or training among end users

• Inflexible tools that frustrate employees and lead to workarounds

• An inability to monitor purchases in real time
  
  

When compliance drops, so does control. 

According to research by The Hackett Group, top-performing procurement organizations generate more than twice the cost savings by keeping their ability to renegotiate supply agreements and anticipating opportunities. These organizations also reduce maverick buying and contract noncompliance, which results in 60 percent greater savings.

Solution: Use streamlined policies, real-time approval workflows, and guided purchasing tools to ensure team members follow rules.

How to implement a spend management framework

Whether you’re starting from scratch or optimizing an existing spend management system, the goal is to bring greater visibility, control, and alignment to every purchasing decision. A strong framework should scale across teams, support compliance without sacrificing agility, and integrate seamlessly into your existing tech stack.

Use the following steps to help implement an effective spend management strategy, and learn how you can use Amazon Business to simplify execution and accelerate results.

Step 1: Assess your current spend landscape

Start by consolidating business spend data across departments, suppliers, and systems. Identify rogue or off-policy purchases, high-volume or high-risk categories, and redundant vendors to identify inefficiencies. 

Use tools like Spend Visibility with Business Prime to centralize your spend data in one place. This enables you to analyze purchases across users, cost centers, and categories to quickly identify inefficiencies. 

Automated dashboards and analytics, like those that automatically log purchases made in Amazon Business, are also essential for visibility into your current spend landscape.

Step 2: Define clear goals and KPIs

Align your goals with executive priorities. Set performance benchmarks like the following to help you measure success:

• Percent of spend under management

• Policy compliance rate

• Supplier diversity ratio

• Sustainability-aligned spend

   

Step 3: Design scalable policies and approval workflows

Create structured policies without introducing red tape. Build approval policies that balance control and agility by using tiered spending thresholds, preferred vendor categories, and budget-based purchasing rules.

Embedding approval policies into the software employees already use for purchasing makes it easy for teams to abide by those purchase policies and for you to flag any discrepancies. For example, Guided Buying (a Business Prime feature) and Approval Workflows within Amazon Business allow custom rules for spend categories and budgets that help employees make the right purchasing decisions without having to consult documentation or administrators.

Step 4: Integrate systems and automate reporting

Connect your procurement solution with your ERP, analytics tools, and accounting software to reduce manual data entry and human error. Data centralization can improve visibility and enable better decision-making.

For example, Amazon Business integrates with over 300 tools, including SAP Ariba, Coupa, and Oracle. This ensures data about your organization’s Amazon Business purchases flows seamlessly into your financial systems.

Step 5: Train teams and drive adoption

Communicate policies clearly and explain their “why” to increase the likelihood of employee adoption. Show how automation simplifies buying, appoint procurement champions in each department, and ensure training and onboarding are accessible and efficient.

Step 6: Review, refine, and continuously improve

Treat spend management as an evolving discipline. Review spend patterns quarterly, adjust thresholds or suppliers, and celebrate wins to maintain momentum and continuously improve.

The future of spend management

The evolution of spend management is accelerating, and forward-thinking organizations are leveraging technology, data, and responsible purchasing to lead the way. The Amazon Business team acts as your strategic partner, constantly innovating and growing with you.

Here are a few current trends related to the future of spend management.

AI and predictive analytics in procurement

AI enables predictive forecasting, anomaly detection, and smarter data-driven decisions in procurement. Orchestrators of value are using AI to move procurement from a transactional function to a strategic driver of growth. 

According to Pierre Mitchell, distinguished research analyst at Spend Matters, “The need has never been larger and greater to use AI to help manage all the complexity that's in the supply markets.” He’s seeing AI being used to harness the power of supply markets for tailored market intelligence and to create self-service tools for suppliers that reduce time-consuming administrative burdens, freeing up procurement teams for more strategic work.

Responsible purchasing

Socially responsible purchasing (SRP) is the practice of aligning procurement decisions with an organization’s broader social and ethical values. This includes prioritizing suppliers and products that support goals such as environmental sustainability, ethical labor practices, and local economic impact. 

As stakeholder expectations increase around responsible purchasing, more organizations are paying attention to the long-term impact of spending decisions on communities, the environment, and fair access to resources. 

When you use Amazon Business, you have access to suppliers certified based on their sustainability features as well as diverse suppliers—both of which are clearly labeled—to help advance your responsible purchasing goals. 

Integration and automation at scale

As procurement complexity grows, so does the need for future-ready systems that integrate data, automate compliance and decision-making, and offer real-time visibility at scale. Our smart business buying solution enables enterprise-grade automation while maintaining user-friendly interfaces for decentralized teams. 

From control to confidence in every purchase

Spend management creates visibility, control, and strategic value in addition to cost savings and better financial health. When implemented effectively, it aligns procurement with your business strategy, enforces compliance, and empowers users to make responsible purchases. Investing in spend management tools today positions you for greater agility and resilience in the future.

Amazon Business helps enable smarter organizational buying, giving you real-time analytics, guided purchasing controls, and access to more diverse and sustainable suppliers.

Sign up for your free Amazon Business account, or talk with our sales team to discover how to turn the principles of effective spend management into practice.