The 40 to 60% of Company Spend Your Procure-to-Pay System Never Sees

You invested in a Procure-to-Pay system. You configured approval workflows. You connected it to your ERP. And yet, every month-end, your AP team is still processing a stack of invoices with no corresponding PO. Your controller is still chasing spend that never entered the system. Your CFO is still asking why the numbers don't reconcile. The system is not broken. It is incomplete. Traditional P2P platforms are designed to manage spend that has already been formally requested. They are excellent at processing what enters through the front door. What they cannot do, and were never designed to do, is capture the spend that walks in through the side door, the back window, and the car park. That unmanaged spend has a name. It is called maverick spend. And for most mid-market organisations, it accounts for 40 to 60% of total expenditure.

What Is Maverick Spend? (And Why It Also Goes by Several Other Names)

Maverick spend, also called shadow spend, unmanaged spend, off-PO spend, or procurement leakage, refers to any business expenditure that bypasses the organisation's formal procurement and approval processes. It is not always fraudulent. It is not always reckless. In most cases, it is simply the result of how work actually happens versus how finance systems assume work happens. A department head needs a contractor urgently and emails the vendor directly. A team lead approves a SaaS subscription via a vendor portal without raising a requisition. An operations manager books a logistics provider over the phone, and the invoice lands three weeks later with no purchase order in sight. Each of these is a legitimate business expense. None of them entered the formal P2P workflow. The problem is not the intent. The problem is the absence of governance, audit trail, and visibility at the point of commitment, before the spend is made, not after the invoice arrives. Maverick spend, specifically, refers to purchases made outside of approved vendor lists or contracted pricing, a subset of unmanaged spend with direct cost implications. When an employee buys from an unapproved vendor, the organisation loses negotiated pricing, volume discounts, and contractual protections. When this happens at scale, the financial impact is significant.

Tail Spend Management

Tail spend refers to the long tail of low-value, high-frequency transactions that collectively represent a meaningful proportion of total expenditure. Individually, each transaction seems too small to govern formally. Collectively, they add up to a problem. The terminology varies by organisation and analyst. What does not vary is the scale of the problem.

Why Do Traditional P2P Systems Miss It?

Procure-to-Pay platforms are built around a specific assumption: that spend starts with a formal purchase requisition, submitted through a designated system, by an employee who knows the process and chooses to follow it. That assumption holds for a minority of real-world spend. The channels through which spend actually enters an organisation in 2026 include:

• Email, vendor quotes accepted, contractor arrangements agreed, and services commissioned via email chains that never touch the ERP
• Slack and Microsoft Teams, informal approvals given in direct messages or channel threads, with no audit trail and no corresponding PO
• Vendor portals and self-service subscriptions, SaaS tools, cloud services, and platform subscriptions purchased directly, often on a credit card, without procurement involvement
• Verbal approvals, commitments made in meetings or over the phone, where the first formal record of the spend is the invoice itself
• Corporate cards, discretionary spend that bypasses requisition entirely, reconciled after the fact rather than governed before the commitment
• Direct supplier relationships, particularly in operations, facilities, and marketing, where long-standing vendor relationships pre-date the P2P system and continue to operate outside it

A P2P system cannot govern what it cannot see. If the spend commitment happens in a Slack message at 4pm on a Tuesday, the most sophisticated approval workflow in your ERP is irrelevant. By the time the invoice arrives, the commitment has already been made. This is the structural gap that traditional Procure-to-Pay was never designed to address.

What This Costs Your Business

The financial consequences of unmanaged spend are measurable, compounding, and consistently underestimated at the CFO level, because the costs are distributed across functions rather than concentrated in a single line item. Direct cost leakage occurs when purchases are made outside contracted pricing. According to the SAP Concur AP Trends Report 2025, organisations with high maverick spend rates pay an average of 12–18% more for goods and services than contracted rates would require, simply because the purchase bypassed the vendor agreement. Compliance and audit exposure is the cost that keeps finance leaders awake. Every non-PO invoice represents a gap in the audit trail. In regulated industries, financial services, healthcare, public sector supply chains, this is not merely an efficiency problem. It is a controls problem. External auditors and internal compliance teams flag non-PO spend as a governance risk, and remediation is expensive. Duplicate payments and fraud exposure increase in direct proportion to the volume of off-system spend. Without a formal PO to match against, AP teams process invoices based on verbal confirmation or email trails. Planergy's 2024 Procurement Benchmark Report found that organisations with unmanaged spend rates above 40% experience duplicate payment rates three times higher than those with mature intake governance. Working capital inefficiency results from the inability to forecast accurately. When 40–60% of spend is invisible until the invoice arrives, cash flow forecasting becomes reactive rather than predictive. Finance teams cannot optimize payment timing, negotiate early payment discounts, or accurately model month-end positions. Operational drag on AP teams is the cost that is most visible on the ground. Every non-PO invoice requires manual investigation, who approved this, is this vendor contracted, does the amount match any agreement on file? According to IFOL's 2025 Accounts Payable Benchmarking Study, AP teams spend an average of 4.7 hours per week per FTE resolving non-PO invoice exceptions. At scale, this is a significant productivity drain.

The 5 Most Common Sources of Unmanaged Spend

Across mid-market finance operations, the same five spend categories account for the majority of procurement leakage.

• SaaS and technology subscriptions The proliferation of team-level SaaS purchasing is the fastest-growing source of unmanaged spend. Individual teams subscribe to tools, project management platforms, analytics software, communication tools, via credit card or vendor portal, often without IT or procurement visibility. These subscriptions auto-renew, accumulate, and frequently duplicate functionality already paid for elsewhere in the organisation.
• Professional services and contractors Consulting engagements, freelance engagements, and temporary contractor arrangements are disproportionately likely to bypass formal procurement. The urgency of the need, the seniority of the requestor, and the direct nature of the relationship all work against formal process compliance.
• Facilities and operational supplies Ongoing, low-value operational purchases, maintenance supplies, office consumables, facilities services, are frequently managed through direct vendor relationships established before the P2P system existed. The spend is legitimate; the governance is absent.
• Marketing and events expenditure Marketing spend is characterised by speed, creative flexibility, and vendor diversity, all of which sit in tension with formal procurement processes. Agency engagements, event suppliers, and production vendors frequently commit spend before requisitions are raised.
• Travel and entertainment above policy thresholds Corporate card spend above policy thresholds, particularly in commercial and client-facing functions, frequently bypasses formal approval. The commitment is made; the receipt is submitted later. By the point of reconciliation, the governance window has closed.

How Intake-to-Pay Captures Every Channel

The solution to maverick spend is not stricter enforcement of existing P2P workflows. Employees will continue to use the channels that work for them, email, Slack, verbal conversation, regardless of policy. Friction-based compliance does not scale. The solution is to meet spend at the point of commitment, in the channel where it is actually happening, and create the governance layer there, before the PO is bypassed, not after the invoice arrives without one. This is what Intake-to-Pay platforms are designed to do.

Intake-to-Pay (I2P)

I2P extends the formal governance envelope upstream of the P2P system, capturing spend requests wherever they originate and routing them through approval and compliance workflows before a commitment is made. It does not replace P2P. It closes the gap that P2P cannot reach. In practice, this means:

• Omnichannel intake capture, spend requests submitted via email, Slack, Teams, vendor portals, or direct to the I2P platform are captured, classified, and routed automatically. The channel no longer determines whether governance applies.
• Pre-PO approval orchestration, before a commitment is made, the I2P platform routes the request through the appropriate approval chain, policy check, and vendor validation. The PO is generated as an output of an approved request, not as an afterthought.
• Agentic classification and routing, AI agents classify spend intent, identify the relevant vendor contract, check against budget availability, and route to the right approver, without manual triage. Requests that would previously have been emailed directly to a vendor are captured and governed instead.
• Full audit trail from point of request, every spend commitment, from initial request through approval to invoice matching, is logged with a complete decision record. AP teams are no longer reconstructing audit trails from email chains.

According to Ardent Partners' 2025 State of Accounts Payable Report, finance teams using agentic intake platforms recover governance over 40 to 60% of spend that previously bypassed formal P2P workflows.

A Real-World Example: Before vs. After Agentic Intake-to-Pay

The scenario: A mid-market professional services firm, 400 employees, running NetSuite as its ERP with a standard P2P configuration. AP team of three. Monthly invoice volume of approximately 600, of which roughly 240 (40%) arrive with no corresponding PO.