How to Prevent Rogue Spend with Smarter Purchasing Practices

When you review your company's expenses, you don’t want any surprises. Yet when employees buy items without your approval, that's exactly what you get.

Say someone needs office supplies for an urgent project and doesn't have time to go through the usual procurement process. They pick a vendor, make a purchase, and move on. Problem solved—until the costs start adding up.

These unapproved purchases are called rogue spend. And even though they aren't included in your forecasts or contracts, they still impact your bottom line. They also reduce visibility into spending, weaken your ability to negotiate better pricing, and increase the risk of duplicate or unnecessary orders.

With the right approach, you can get ahead of rogue spend before it derails your budget. Here's how to create purchasing practices that prevent unauthorized spending and protect profitability.

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What is rogue spend?

Rogue spend is spending that occurs outside your regular procurement process or vendor agreements. It often happens for practical reasons like insufficient training, unclear policies, or overly complex processes—not out of bad intentions.

To identify rogue spending, look for purchases that:

Didn’t get appropriate approval
Occurred outside your procurement system
Weren't tracked or documented properly

When an employee makes an off-process purchase or buys based on convenience rather than a contract, you lose advantages like negotiation leverage, volume discounts, spend control, and purchase accountability. This behavior also undermines your procurement strategy and makes it harder to achieve spend efficiency and predictable results.

Is rogue spend the same as maverick spend?

You’ve probably heard rogue spend and maverick spend used interchangeably. Both terms describe the same problem: spending that bypasses your approved procurement process. Some industries favor one term over the other, but the financial impacts are identical.inesses and the most in need of strong budgetary controls.

Why rogue spend undermines profitability

“Going rogue” isn't usually good for business, especially when it hurts your bottom line.

Rogue spending disrupts your spend management strategy and the processes your procurement department has built. It reduces spend visibility, impacting not only budgets and profitability but vendor contracts and decision-making.

Rogue spending can impact your finances and systems with:

Redundant purchases
Extra inventory sitting unused
Overlooked subscriptions
Wasted time finding redundant suppliers
Higher costs from off-contract spending
Weakened bargaining power

Case study: How CorePower Yoga cut $50K in rogue spend

With 176 corporately owned studio locations each making independent buying decisions, CorePower Yoga was averaging close to $50,000 a month in rogue spend. The yoga chain had no operational system in place to manage purchasing, and its accounts payable team was paying invoices late since it was so overwhelmed.

To support continued growth and bring expenses back on budget, CorePower Yoga partnered with Order.co to centralize purchasing and consolidate invoicing.

The result:

$50K monthly reduction in rogue spend
$11K/month saved on product purchases
100% line-item visibility across orders

With Order.co, CorePower Yoga replaced disconnected, inefficient purchasing with a system built for accountability and control.

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How to detect rogue spend in your organization

Do you have a rogue spend problem? It's possible, especially if you're discovering purchases weeks or months after they happen.

But stopping rogue spend doesn't have to be difficult. In fact, you can even make it automatic. The first step is identifying when and where unmanaged spend occurs:

Analyze your spend data for noncompliant purchases that don’t follow your guidelines.
Compare invoices to POs and contracts to catch anything that wasn't approved.
Review corporate credit card activity and expense reports for one-off or out-of-policy buys.
Use procurement software that flags unauthorized purchases.
Leverage AI tools to help detect unusual patterns, unapproved vendors, or sudden spending spikes.

With the right systems and support, you can detect rogue spend before it impacts your budget. Technology allows you to track expenses in real time, reduce manual processes that increase the risk of issues, and focus on prevention instead of cleanup. procurement workflows, improve spend visibility, and enforce compliance across every purchase.

5 strategies to prevent unauthorized purchasing

Unauthorized spending often stems from gaps in visibility, inconsistent processes, or inefficient systems. These five strategies help improve control with centralized tools, improved analytics, and incentives that make compliance easy.

Enforce clear procurement guidelines

Procurement guidelines help steer the ship by laying out expectations and providing accountability. They answer questions like:

Who can make a purchase, and what is the process?
Which vendors are approved?
What spending thresholds require oversight?

The key is keeping your procurement playbook simple, accessible, and up to date. Make your guidelines flexible enough for procurement leaders to adjust as the market shifts or your needs change.

Three purchase orders from Costco, EpicGlove, and US Foods in the processing stage via API, phone, and email — *(Source)*

Automate approval workflows

Automated approvals help curb rogue spending by taking the guesswork out of following the rules. With the right tool, you can set up routing rules based on spend thresholds, department, or location to speed up purchasing without losing control.

This approach prevents unauthorized purchasing before it happens and makes the buying process easier for everyone. Employees don’t need to wait on a slow approval process for urgent items, and procurement professionals maintain visibility without micromanaging every transaction.

Dashboard shows pending orders for approval and budget statuses, highlighting approvals and rejections by location — (*Source*)

Consolidate vendors and negotiate contracts

When different teams buy the same types of products from multiple suppliers, your organization sacrifices bargaining power and ends up paying more than necessary. But consolidating vendors to take advantage of aggregate spend doesn’t mean placing all your trust in a single supplier. It simply means being strategic about selecting the right partners and organizing your contracts and processes to secure better prices and terms.

With Order.co's centralized purchasing system, you can access all your vendors in one place. Teams can purchase what they need through an approved catalog, eliminating the need to source sellers on their own.

You can also add policies to your procurement flow so buyers get reminders that keep purchasing approved and in contract. Built-in budgets, automatic approvals, and indirect spend controls help you maintain tighter purchasing oversight, while consolidating spend gives you the leverage to negotiate better contracts, achieve substantial cost savings, and build stronger supplier relationships.

Unified product catalog integrated with suppliers like Costco, Amazon, and Walmart — (*Source*)

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