---
title: "What Is Maverick Spend?"
url: https://www.uncap.com/glossary/maverick-spend
author: "Denis Dyli"
published: 2026-10-28
updated: 2026-10-28
summary: "Maverick spend is business purchasing that happens outside the channels an organization has agreed: buying from a supplier that is not approved, ignoring a negotiated contract, or skipping the purchase order and approval steps. In SAP S/4HANA, an Off-Contract Spend app measures part of it: spend on purchases without a contract reference."
---

# What Is Maverick Spend?

> Maverick spend is business purchasing that happens outside the channels an organization has agreed: buying from a supplier that is not approved, ignoring a negotiated contract, or skipping the purchase order and approval steps. In SAP S/4HANA, an Off-Contract Spend app measures part of it: spend on purchases without a contract reference.

**Maverick spend**: Maverick spend is business purchasing that happens outside the channels an organization has agreed: buying from a supplier that is not approved, ignoring a negotiated contract, or skipping the purchase order and approval steps. In SAP S/4HANA, an Off-Contract Spend app measures part of it: spend on purchases without a contract reference.

## How it works

Maverick spend is purchasing that goes around an organization's own buying rules, such as a purchase from a supplier that is not on the [approved vendor list](/glossary/approved-vendor-list), or an order placed without a [purchase requisition](/glossary/purchase-requisition), purchase order or approval.

It starts after sourcing is done. A [strategic sourcing](/glossary/strategic-sourcing) effort ends with awarded contracts, and the US Office of Management and Budget's 2005 memo on strategic sourcing asked federal agencies to make employees aware of awarded strategic sourcing contracts and how they are to be used. Any purchase that bypasses those agreements is maverick spend.

ERP vendors document controls that keep buying on agreed channels:

- Approved vendor checks. In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, an Approved vendor check method sets the policy for what should happen if a product is added to a purchase order line where the vendor isn't an approved vendor.
- Preferred vendors on requisitions. In the same system, when a purchase requisition is created, there may be a requirement to select an approved or preferred vendor, depending on how the purchasing policies are set up.
- Spend reporting. SAP S/4HANA's analytics apps measure purchases made without a contract, as the next section shows.

## Maverick spend vs. off-contract spend

SAP's training for SAP S/4HANA contract management says the Off-Contract Spend app helps analyze the total amount spent on purchases without a contract reference. It gives insight into non-contract purchases made without negotiated pricing or blanket purchase agreements, and it tracks the percentage of purchases made without a contract.

Not every off-contract purchase is maverick spend, because some items have no contract to use. The same training describes a Contract Leakage app that narrows the view: it identifies the spend of purchase orders that do not have a contract reference, although an existing contract could have been used. Leakage is the part of off-contract spend that went around an agreement already in place, which is maverick spend in the plain sense.

## Example

A distributor's purchase order items for the quarter total $1,200,000.

- Off-contract spend: $180,000 of those items carry no contract reference. $180,000 / $1,200,000 = 0.15, an off-contract rate of 15%.
- Leakage: $60,000 of the $180,000 went to items that already had a contract with another supplier. $60,000 / $1,200,000 = 0.05, so 5% of spend bypassed an existing agreement.
- The rest: the other $120,000 bought items with no contract in place, which is a sourcing gap rather than a policy breach.

## On Shopify

When your buyers order from your Shopify B2B store, these features are available on the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus plans:

- Location-level permissions: location admin and ordering only.
- Checkout to draft: you can require B2B customer orders to be placed as drafts based on company location, which lets you review and make changes to orders before they're confirmed.
- PO numbers: B2B customers can add purchase order (PO) numbers to an order.

## How Uncap helps

Uncap's article on [reviews, approvals and permissions in B2B](/post/reviews-approval-permissions-the-foundation-of-b2b) says they are how organizations protect themselves from unauthorized spend, enforce procurement policy, and make sure the right people are accountable for the right decisions. On the seller side, Uncap Quotes keeps a full revision history on every quote, and approval routing sends exceptions to the right approver.

## Related terms

- Purchasing card
- Procure-to-pay
- Blanket purchase order
- Eprocurement
- Three-way match

## Sources

- SAP Learning: Working with analytics for contracts in SAP S/4HANA
- Microsoft Learn: Approve vendors for specific products
- OMB: Implementing Strategic Sourcing (May 20, 2005)

## Frequently asked questions

### What does maverick purchase mean?

A maverick purchase is a business purchase made outside an organization's agreed buying channels, for example from a supplier that is not approved, outside a negotiated contract, or without the required purchase order or approval. Maverick spend is the total of those purchases.

### What is meant by spend analysis?

Spend analysis is reviewing what an organization has bought, from which suppliers and at what prices, so it can decide how to buy in future. The US Office of Management and Budget's 2005 memo on strategic sourcing says the effort begins with a spend analysis, and the same data shows where maverick spend happens.

### How do you calculate maverick spend?

Start from purchase order data. Divide the spend on purchase orders without a contract reference by total purchase order spend to get the off-contract rate, which SAP S/4HANA's Off-Contract Spend app tracks as a percentage. Then isolate spend without a contract reference where an existing contract could have been used, which SAP calls contract leakage: that is the maverick share.