eProcureAI / Platform / Control maverick spend
Use caseMaverick spend is almost never defiance. It is arithmetic. Make the compliant route the quickest one and most of it disappears without a single policy reminder.
Nothing gets blocked. Blocking pushes spend onto personal cards where you can see none of it.
Ask somebody why they bought outside the process and the answer is almost always the same. They needed it, the proper route was going to take a week, and somebody they knew could get it that afternoon.
That is worth taking seriously rather than treating as a compliance failure. If your compliant path takes twenty minutes to start and a week to finish, and the informal one takes a phone call, people will keep choosing the phone call no matter how many reminders go out.
The usual response is to tighten. Block off catalog purchases, require more approvals, send another policy note. It rarely works, and when it does work it often works badly, because spend moves onto personal cards and expense claims where you have no visibility at all.
Make buying correctly the fastest option available. Put the things people actually buy in a catalog at agreed prices. Let low value catalog purchases clear with no approval at all. Keep raising a request to about two minutes.
Then leave the off catalog route open, but route it for review with the reason captured. You get the purchase, the record and the reason, instead of losing all three.
Twenty minutes of form filling against a two minute phone call. People are optimising their day, not undermining your controls.
If half of what somebody needs is not in it, they stop checking. A thin catalog quietly teaches people to go around it.
Requiring sign off on a box of pens tells people the process is not calibrated, and they treat the rest of it accordingly.
Off process purchases surface at year end, if at all. By then the conversation is archaeology rather than a decision.
Catalog items at agreed prices, with no approval needed under a threshold you set. For most everyday purchases the compliant route is now genuinely quicker than asking somebody.
People still need things nobody anticipated. Those requests go through with the reason captured, so you keep the purchase, the record and the explanation.
Buying from a contracted supplier at non contracted prices is the version that hides best, because the supplier name on the report looks correct.
The first two are obvious once you look. The last three are the ones that survive for years.
| Pattern | What it looks like | How it is spotted |
|---|---|---|
| Entirely new supplier | A name nobody recognises appearing on invoices | Obvious in the supplier list, easy to challenge |
| Personal card and expenses | Purchases appearing as reimbursements rather than orders | Visible when procurement and expense data are compared |
| Contracted supplier, wrong price | The right name on the invoice at the wrong rate | Price variance against the agreement, by category |
| Right supplier, wrong item | Buying an item outside the agreed catalog from an approved supplier | Off catalog flag on the request |
| Split purchases | Several smaller orders staying below an approval threshold | Repeat purchases from the same requester over a short window |
The last one is worth watching deliberately, because it usually means a threshold is set at a level that does not match how people actually buy.
Start with the fifty items that account for most requests. Anything missing is a reason to go around the process.
Below a figure you choose, catalog purchases need no approval. This single change moves more behaviour than any policy note.
A request that needs a desktop gets postponed, and postponed requests become phone calls.
Six fields, most of which remember themselves. Every extra field is an argument for the informal route.
Blocking moves spend somewhere invisible. Reviewing keeps it in the system with a reason attached.
Items requested off catalog repeatedly are telling you exactly what to add next.
You cannot police your way out of maverick spend. You can out compete it on speed.
Pick from a list, or explain why they cannot. Neither takes long.
Applies the price, routes the exception and keeps score by category.
We will show what the leakage looks like when the transactions behind it are attached.
Book your free demoRelated: All solutions and Catalog