Software Solutions for Controlling Maverick Spend in Your Organization
Software Solutions for Controlling Maverick Spend in Your Organization
Unauthorized, off-policy purchases — often called maverick spending — can create significant financial and operational challenges for growing organizations. When employees buy from unapproved vendors or use personal cards for business expenses, finance and procurement teams lose visibility and control. The right software is the most effective tool for tracking and preventing these unauthorized purchases, ensuring every dollar spent is compliant, visible, and strategic.
This article explores the software solutions designed to rein in maverick spend. We will cover the essential features to look for in a procurement platform, compare some of the top tools available, and explain why a unified, end-to-end system offers the most comprehensive control over off-policy purchases.
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Key features in software that controls maverick spend
The best procurement software for managing maverick spend provides a framework that makes it easier for employees to buy the right things from the right vendors while giving leaders the tools to enforce policy. When evaluating tools to track unauthorized purchases, look for a solution with these core features.
Centralized product catalogs
A centralized product catalog is the foundation for preventing maverick spend. This feature allows organizations to create a curated, pre-approved marketplace where employees can easily find and purchase items that comply with company standards for branding, quality, and price. By guiding users to approved products and suppliers, you eliminate the guesswork and temptation to buy from outside sources.
Unlike systems that rely on clunky punchouts to individual vendor sites, a unified catalog brings every item from every vendor into one intuitive shopping experience. This simplifies the buying process and ensures every purchase request originates from a controlled environment, stopping off-policy purchases before they happen.
Automated and customizable approval workflows
Automated approval workflows are essential for enforcing purchasing policies without creating bottlenecks. Effective software allows you to build multi-level approval chains based on variables like department, location, order value, and product category. When an employee submits a purchase request, it is automatically routed to the correct approver, ensuring every transaction is reviewed before a purchase order is created.
This level of automation provides a clear audit trail for every purchase and gives managers the ability to approve or deny requests from anywhere. It streamlines the entire procurement process, making compliance the path of least resistance for everyone involved.
Real-time spend visibility and analytics
Real-time spend visibility is a critical feature for any tool designed to track unauthorized purchases. A platform that captures 100% of transaction data in a central dashboard gives you line-item-level insight into who is buying what, from which vendors, and at what cost.
This data is crucial for identifying patterns of non-compliant purchasing across departments or locations. With robust spend analysis capabilities, finance leaders can quickly spot maverick activity, analyze its root causes, and adjust procurement policies to prevent it from recurring.
ERP and accounting system integrations
To maintain a single source of financial truth, your procurement tool must integrate seamlessly with your existing ERP or accounting system. This ensures that purchasing data flows automatically into your financial records without manual data entry. Look for a solution that syncs clean, consolidated invoice data directly into your system.
This level of integration not only saves the accounting team countless hours but also improves data accuracy for forecasting and financial reporting. When your procurement and financial systems are connected, you gain a complete, real-time picture of your organization's spend.
Choose the Right Procurement Technology With This Decision Matrix
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Comparing top tools for controlling off-policy purchases
Several types of software claim to help manage maverick spend, but they approach the problem from different angles. Understanding their core functions and limitations is key to choosing the right solution for your business.
Card-based spend management platforms (e.g., PayEm)
Card-based solutions like PayEm focus on controlling spend through the use of virtual and physical corporate cards with pre-set spending limits. These platforms are useful for managing expenses and giving employees a straightforward way to make purchases.
However, their primary focus is on managing payments rather than procurement. While they can set limits on transactions, they offer limited control over what is being purchased or from whom. Employees can still buy off-brand or non-compliant items as long as they stay within their budget, and consolidating purchases from multiple vendors remains a manual process. This leaves significant gaps where maverick spend can occur.
Traditional procure-to-pay software (e.g., Procurify)
Platforms like Procurify offer a more traditional procure-to-pay workflow, helping to automate requisitions, purchase orders, and approvals. They provide greater visibility into the purchasing process than card-based solutions and are designed to bring spend under management.
While these tools are a step in the right direction, they can sometimes have complex user interfaces that hinder adoption. If a system is difficult to navigate, employees may find workarounds, leading to the very off-policy purchases you’re trying to prevent. Furthermore, some systems struggle with integrating all types of vendors, especially smaller, offline suppliers, leaving parts of your spend unmanaged.
Source-to-pay suites for large enterprises (e.g., Ivalua, Fairmarkit)
Comprehensive source-to-pay (S2P) suites are tools built for large, global enterprises with complex sourcing needs. Platforms like Ivalua and Fairmarkit offer modules for processes like strategic sourcing, contract management, and supplier risk and performance.
While these systems can be effective, they are often too complex and costly for mid-market businesses. Their feature sets can be overwhelming, and implementation can be a long and resource-intensive process. For organizations that need a straightforward, easy-to-adopt solution for controlling indirect spend like office supplies, consumables, and IT equipment, these enterprise-level tools may be overkill.
Order.co: The unified platform for total spend control
Order.co offers a superior approach by unifying the entire purchase-to-pay lifecycle in a single, guided marketplace. Unlike other solutions that only address one part of the problem, Order.co addresses spend at its origin: the point of purchase. By combining a centralized marketplace, automated approvals, strategic sourcing, and consolidated payments, it provides the most controlled environment possible for eliminating maverick spend.
With a user-friendly interface that encourages adoption and the flexibility to manage every vendor (online and offline), Order.co is the only platform that delivers complete spend control without disrupting existing workflows.
Why a unified platform is the most effective maverick spend tool
Disparate systems for purchasing, payments, and expenses create data silos and process gaps that make it nearly impossible to fully control maverick spend. Employees may use a corporate card for one purchase, file an expense report for another, and place an unapproved order directly with a vendor for a third. Tracking these transactions across different systems is a manual, time-consuming nightmare for finance teams.
A unified platform solves this problem by bringing every purchase and every vendor into one centralized system. This approach offers several distinct advantages:
- Proactive vs. reactive control: Card-based and expense management tools are reactive; they track spend after it has already happened. A unified procurement platform is proactive. By guiding employees to pre-approved products in a centralized catalog and enforcing approval workflows before an order is placed, it prevents off-policy purchases from ever occurring.
- 100% spend visibility: When all purchasing flows through a single system, you gain complete, real-time visibility into every transaction. This eliminates the blind spots created by disconnected systems and gives you a single source of truth for all spent data.
- Improved user adoption: A simple, intuitive, all-in-one platform is easier for employees to use than juggling multiple systems. High user adoption is critical for the success of any spend management software, as it ensures that employees follow the established process instead of seeking out-of-policy workarounds.
- Streamlined AP and financial operations: A unified system automates the entire process, from requisition to reconciliation. With features like Consolidated Billing, you receive a single invoice for all purchases across all vendors, dramatically reducing the workload for your accounts payable team. This level of AP automation is impossible to achieve with a collection of disconnected point solutions.
Choose the Right Procurement Technology With This Decision Matrix
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How Order.co's AI-powered platform eliminates unauthorized purchases
Order.co is purpose-built to give finance, operations, and procurement teams total control over their organization's spend. It simplifies buying for every employee while providing the guardrails needed to eliminate off-policy purchases and drive significant cost savings.
Here’s how the platform provides the ultimate control over maverick spend:
AI-powered strategic sourcing and cost savings
Order.co AI actively works to save you money on every purchase. When a user adds an item to their cart, our AI sourcing engine automatically scans our network of thousands of vendors to find the same product for a better price or recommend a cost-effective alternative. This proactive approach ensures you’re not just controlling spend but also optimizing it, leading to an average of 5% savings on product costs.
A guided B2B marketplace
At the heart of Order.co is a fully customizable, vendor-agnostic marketplace. You can add products from any of your vendors — or from the 40,000+ already in Order.co’s network — into one unified catalog. This creates a single, approved place for employees to shop.
- Enforce brand and product standards: Ensure every location buys the same pre-approved items, maintaining brand consistency and quality control.
- Curate preferred vendors: Guide employees to strategically sourced suppliers to maximize negotiated savings and consolidate spend.
- Make punchouts obsolete: Instead of managing dozens of individual vendor punchouts, Order.co brings all products into one seamless interface, simplifying the buying experience and increasing compliance.
Customizable controls and automated approvals
Order.co allows you to build sophisticated, automated controls directly into the purchasing workflow. This ensures every purchase is compliant before it happens.
- Set dynamic budgets: Assign budgets by user, department, or location to prevent overspending. The system automatically blocks any purchase that exceeds the allocated budget.
- Automate approval routing: Create custom, multi-level approval workflows to ensure every purchase request gets the right oversight without slowing down the process. As Stefanie Teintze, a specialist at CorePower Yoga, noted, "By implementing controls and approval processes, Order.co has allowed us to essentially eliminate all unapproved spending, which had gotten as high as $50,000 per month.”
- Eliminate expense reports for products: Channeling all product purchases through a single platform eliminates the need for employees to use personal cards and file expense reports, a common source of maverick spend.
Take control of your organization’s maverick spend
Eliminating maverick spend requires a solution that addresses the root of the problem: a decentralized and uncontrolled purchasing process. While various tools can help you track purchases, only a unified procurement and finance automation platform like Order.co provides the controls to proactively prevent off-policy spend.
By centralizing all vendors and transactions into a single AI-powered system, you can achieve complete spend control, unlock significant savings, and streamline your entire purchase-to-pay process.
Ready to see how Order.co can simplify buying and eliminate unauthorized purchases for your business? Schedule a demo to get started.
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