Wellness is one of the fastest-growing sectors in the economy. McKinsey estimates the U.S. wellness market alone has reached $480 billion and is growing 5 to 10 percent per year. For multi-location operators running spas, medspas, fitness studios, and clinics, that growth is exciting. It also creates a challenge: every new location adds more vendors, more orders, and more invoices, and most of that buying happens outside any central system.

If you manage finance or operations for a wellness brand with more than one site, you already recognize the symptoms. One location orders towels from a distributor that the corporate office never approved. Another puts supplies on a personal card and expenses them weeks later. By month-end close, nobody can say with confidence how much the company spent on consumables, or why one clinic paid 30% more than another for the same product.

This article breaks down why multi-location wellness brands struggle to control spend, what it costs when that spend goes unmanaged, and the tools and strategies that fix it.

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Why is spend so hard to control across wellness locations?

Spend gets hard to control because wellness brands buy a high volume of physical goods from many small vendors, and each location tends to buy independently. A single medspa location might order skincare products, disposables, linens, retail inventory, and cleaning supplies from a dozen different suppliers in a month. Multiply that by 10, 30, or 50 sites, and the number of buying decisions grows faster than any finance team can track.

Three features of the wellness industry make this worse than in most sectors.

• High consumable turnover: Treatment rooms, locker rooms, and retail shelves burn through supplies daily, so reordering happens constantly.
• Brand and compliance standards: Guests expect consistent products and experiences, so what one location buys has to match every other location.
• Distributed autonomy: Studio managers and clinic leads need to buy quickly to keep operations running, which pushes purchasing away from any central approval.

Each of these is a good thing for the business. Fast reordering keeps rooms turning over. Local autonomy keeps guests happy. The trouble starts when none of that buying is visible or governed, which is where unmanaged, or "maverick," spend takes hold.

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What happens when wellness spend goes unmanaged?

Unmanaged spend quietly erodes margins, and the leak is bigger than most operators expect. Maverick spend, purchases made outside approved suppliers and company policy, can account for up to 80% of a company's total spend when no controls are in place. For a growing wellness brand, that translates into real, recurring losses.

Consider what off-policy buying costs a multi-location operator:

• Lost negotiating leverage: When 40 locations each buy the same gloves from different vendors, the brand forfeits the volume discount it would earn by buying together.
• Price variance across sites: Identical products get purchased at wildly different prices, and nobody catches it until the numbers are already spent.
• Slower, messier close: Finance teams chase receipts, decode credit-card statements, and manually match invoices instead of closing the books.
• Compliance and brand risk: Off-catalog products can break brand standards or, in regulated categories like cannabis and medspa, create audit exposure.

The pattern is consistent: the money is already gone by the time anyone sees it. That timing is the core issue. Most spend tools report on purchases after they happen. The fix is to move control upstream, to the moment of purchase.

What tools and strategies help wellness brands manage spend?

The strongest approach controls spend at the point of purchase, then layers in visibility, sourcing, and payment automation. Below are the main options wellness brands use, starting with the one that governs spend before it happens.

Procurement platforms

Procurement platforms centralize vendors, catalogs, and approval workflows into a single system so every location orders from one approved list. Instead of catching off-policy spend at month-end close, a procurement platform prevents it: pre-approved catalogs and guided approvals stop rogue purchases before they happen. Line items are coded and verified at the point of purchase, which means orders reconcile automatically without manual 3-way matching. The result is cleaner data flowing into your ERP, fewer invoice discrepancies, and finance teams that close faster.

For a multi-location wellness brand, this looks like building one catalog of approved skincare products, linens, and disposables that every spa or studio orders from, with approval rules that route exceptions to the right manager before the purchase goes through.

Order.co is one example of a procurement platform that partners with wellness brands. It combines a unified vendor catalog with built-in net terms and B2B Buy Now, Pay Later, and automatically pushes clean invoice data into systems like NetSuite, QuickBooks, and Sage Intacct. Platforms like Precoro and ProcureDesk also offer catalog-based purchasing for mid-market teams, though with different vendor network sizes and payment options.

P-cards and virtual cards

Corporate purchasing cards (P-cards) and virtual cards give locations a fast way to buy while giving finance a real-time feed of transactions. They work well for controlling who can spend and setting per-card or per-transaction limits. Platforms like Rho let you restrict cards by merchant category or vendor, while BILL Spend & Expense ties each card to a budget so managers see remaining balances before they swipe.

The limitation is specificity. A card authorizes a dollar amount, not a specific product, so a studio manager can stay under the limit and still buy off-brand or off-policy items. Cards report what was spent, not whether it should have been. For wellness brands with strict product standards (think medical-grade skincare or branded retail inventory), card controls alone won't enforce catalog compliance.

Spend management and analytics platforms

Spend analytics tools aggregate transactions across locations and give finance dashboards to spot trends, price variance, and budget overruns. Coupa, for example, provides AI-powered spend classification and benchmarking across categories, while JAGGAER offers 65+ pre-built dashboards built on Tableau for drilling into supplier performance and tail spend. SAP Ariba bundles analytics into its broader source-to-pay suite for enterprises already running SAP.

These tools are valuable for gaining spend visibility and building a case for vendor consolidation or renegotiation. A wellness brand might use spend analytics to discover that 12 locations are buying the same massage oil from eight different suppliers at prices ranging 20% apart. The catch is that most platforms analyze spend after it occurs, so they diagnose the problem without preventing the next off-policy order.

AP automation software

Accounts payable automation removes the manual work of processing invoices and paying vendors. It speeds up close and cuts data-entry errors. Tipalti, for example, handles global payments in 200+ countries and connects directly to NetSuite and other ERPs. BILL offers invoice capture with OCR and approval routing, and now embeds natively inside NetSuite's interface. Stampli is collaboration-first, letting team members comment on and resolve invoice questions inside the platform.

AP automation handles the payment side of the cycle. It delivers the most value when the purchasing side is already controlled, so the invoices flowing in are already clean and accurate.

Which spend management approach is right for your wellness brand?

Use the table below to match your primary goal to the approach that addresses it. Many brands combine several, but the column on the far right shows where control actually starts.

The takeaway is simple. Reporting tools tell you what already happened. Point-of-purchase control decides what happens in the first place.

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Learn the key pillars of a strong strategy, valuable procurement metrics to track, and initiatives you can start implementing today.

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How does a real wellness brand cut costs at scale?

XpresSpa, a luxury travel spa business with more than 50 locations, cut costs and gained control by centralizing fragmented purchasing on Order.co. Before the change, ordering was scattered across dozens of vendors and sites, which drove up costs and buried spend visibility.

After centralizing purchasing and moving its locations onto one approved catalog, XpresSpa achieved measurable results in its first year:

• Saved $68,000 through strategic sourcing initiatives.
• Improved on-catalog compliance from 70% to 100%.
• Reduced management approvals required per order by 53%.

"Order.co has helped us find savings and solutions to match ever-increasing demand," said Tesh Ramsarup, XpresSpa's Operations Manager. "While the savings in dollars is clear to see, the immense time-savings for our spa field teams and spa support center cannot be underrated."

The compliance jump matters most. Moving from 70% to 100% on-catalog buying means nearly a third of purchases that used to happen off-policy now run through an approved, negotiated catalog. That is the difference between reporting on spend and governing it.

Getting started with spend management

Wellness brands grow by adding locations. Each new site should extend your control over spend, not dilute it. The tools above work best in combination: use strategic sourcing and spend analytics to identify where money leaks, a procurement platform to enforce the right catalog at every location, and AP automation to speed up payments on the back end.

If you're evaluating procurement platforms, schedule a demo with Order.co to see how a unified catalog and guided approvals work for multi-location wellness brands.

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