Procurement
Lost negotiated savings
When spend skips procurement, you give up the discount a negotiated contract would have got you. Ardent Partners puts that at 6% to 12% in the first contract period.
Spend × Unmanaged % × Savings rate
Free tool · Shadow spend calculator
What is shadow spend
costing you this year?
Enter four numbers you already have in your ERP and card data. You'll get an estimate of what unmanaged spend costs your business each year, based on 2025–26 benchmarks.
Calculate your cost of shadow spend
Your numbers
Total paid to suppliers last year
100% minus spend under management. The average is about 29%
Card, expense and PO-less software spend per year
Your AP system's invoice count for the last 12 months
Adjust the assumptions
Ardent Partners: 6% to 12% in the first contract period
Zylo 2026 average: 36%
Ardent Partners: $12.88 average vs $2.78 best-in-class
Estimated annual cost of shadow spend
$1,091,148
That's $90,929 a month.
Lost negotiated savings$696,000
$40,000,000 × 29% × 6%
Wasted software licences$360,000
$1,000,000 × 36% unused
Extra invoice processing$35,148
12,000 invoices × 29% × $10.10
Treat this as a floor. It leaves out duplicate payments and the cost of a fraud or breach. IBM found high shadow AI use added $670,000 to the average breach.
How It Works
Three costs, worked out
in the open.
Every number comes from a simple formula, so you can check it or rebuild it in a spreadsheet. Your total is the sum of the three.
Software
Wasted software licences
Software bought on cards and expense reports often gets duplicated across teams, then left unused. Zylo found 36% of SaaS licences go unused on average.
Shadow software × Unused rate
Accounts payable
Extra invoice processing
A PO-less invoice can't match automatically, so someone has to chase it. $10.10 is the gap between an average AP team's cost per invoice and a best-in-class team's.
Invoices × Unmanaged % × $10.10
The Benchmarks
Where the defaults
come from.
The defaults lean conservative. If you know your own figures, use them.
| Default | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Spend outside approved process | 29% | Ardent Partners: average spend under management is about 71% |
| Savings rate | 6% | Ardent Partners: 6% to 12% per dollar brought under management |
| Unused licence rate | 36% | Zylo, 2026 SaaS Management Index |
| Extra handling per PO-less invoice | $10.10 | Ardent Partners, AP Metrics that Matter in 2025: $12.88 vs $2.78 per invoice |
| Shadow AI breach premiumNot in total | $670,000 | IBM, 2025 Cost of a Data Breach |
FAQs
Questions about the calculator
What is shadow spend?
Shadow spend is any money your company commits outside its approved buying process. Finance usually only finds out when the invoice or card statement arrives. Read the full guide: What Is Shadow Spend?
How accurate is this calculator?
It gives you a directional estimate based on published benchmarks, and the defaults lean conservative. Replace them with figures from your own ERP and card data for a sharper number.
What does it leave out?
Duplicate payments and the cost of a fraud or data breach. Those are risks rather than steady annual costs, but in a bad year they can be bigger than everything the calculator measures.
Where do I find my spend under management?
Divide the spend that went through an approved request, PO or contract by your total third-party spend. If you don't track it, start with invoices paid without a PO as a share of total spend.
Is my data stored anywhere?
No. Everything is worked out in your browser, and nothing you type is sent to us.
Shrink the Number
See where your
shadow spend starts.
Blackbee AI is an agentic Intake-to-Pay platform that sits above your ERP. It catches spend at intent and checks it against your policy and contracts before anyone commits, so your ERP gets clean, structured data at the end. You choose which steps it handles, and it does only those, and does them well.
EXPLORE MORE