Stopping Maverick Spend: Why Every PM Buys From Their Own Suppliers (and How Approval Workflows Fix It)

Three PMs, Three Projects, Three Procurement Processes

Walk through any controls shop with more than a couple of project managers and you’ll find the same thing. The PM running the hospital job has a longtime rep at the local distributor and orders everything by email. The PM on the campus retrofit logs into the Johnson Controls portal under an account he set up himself three years ago. The third keeps her own spreadsheet of part numbers and calls whichever supplier answers the phone first.

Every one of those orders makes sense on its own. The PM needed parts, knew where to get them, and kept the job moving. But step back to the company level and what you’re looking at is maverick spend: material dollars going out the door through channels purchasing can’t see, at prices nobody approved, with no record until the order confirmations — or worse, the invoices — start landing.

What Maverick Spend Actually Costs You

Maverick spend is any purchase that happens outside your sanctioned procurement process. It doesn’t look like a problem from inside any single project. The costs only show up when you look across all of them.

Two PMs pay two prices for the same part. Negotiated pricing only saves money when orders actually go through it. A PM ordering off a personal portal login or a rep relationship pays whatever that channel quotes that day. The same actuator can land on two projects 20% apart in cost — and nobody notices, because nobody sees both orders side by side.

Your volume is invisible at negotiation time. When spend is scattered across personal accounts, one-off emails, and individual relationships, it doesn’t roll up anywhere. Come contract renewal, you’re negotiating with numbers that understate what your company actually buys — and leaving rebates and volume tiers on the table.

Committed costs don’t show up until the invoice does. Job costing depends on knowing what’s been ordered, not just what’s been billed. When PMs place orders purchasing can’t see, your work-in-progress reports lag reality by weeks. Projects that look healthy on paper are quietly underwater.

You get duplicate and conflicting orders. When the PM and the purchasing team can each order independently — and neither can see what the other did — the same controllers get bought twice for the same job. Now you’re paying restocking fees to fix a visibility problem.

There’s no audit trail. When the wrong part shows up, or a supplier bills the wrong price, the record of what was ordered and who approved it lives in someone’s inbox. If that person is on vacation — or gone — so is the answer.

Industry studies regularly put maverick spend at 10-20% of total purchasing. For a controls contractor doing a few million in annual material spend, that’s a six-figure blind spot.

Why It Happens (It’s Not Your PMs)

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: PMs don’t route around purchasing because they’re careless. They route around it because it’s slower than doing it themselves.

If the official process means sending a parts list to the office, waiting for someone to work through supplier portals, and hoping the order goes out before the job needs it, then the PM’s own rep — who answers the phone on the first ring — will always win. Your PMs are optimizing for the thing you actually pay them for: keeping projects on schedule. The procurement process is in their way.

That means the fix isn’t a sternly worded memo about purchasing policy. Policies don’t beat convenience. The only thing that beats convenience is more convenience.

What a Real Fix Looks Like

The shops that get maverick spend under control don’t take ordering away from their PMs — that just recreates the bottleneck that caused the problem. Instead, they keep the speed PMs already have and add the control purchasing is missing.

In practice, that means:

1. PMs order from one catalog instead of five channels. Every supplier, with your real negotiated pricing, in one place. The PM picks the parts and submits a requisition with the POs already queued up — faster than logging into a portal or writing an email, and the pricing is right by default.

2. An approval queue purchasing actually controls. Every requisition lands in front of the right person before a single PO goes out. They can approve it, request changes, place a hold, or release it — in seconds, from one screen, instead of reconstructing what happened from forwarded emails.

3. A full audit trail. Every action is logged with who did it and when. When a question comes up three months later, the answer is in the activity log, not in someone’s memory.

4. Everything coded to a project from the start. Because the requisition originates inside the system, it’s tied to a job, a supplier, and a price the moment it’s created. Committed costs show up in your job costing the day they’re committed — not when the invoice arrives.

The result: PMs keep their autonomy and their speed, and purchasing sees every dollar before it leaves the building. No PO goes out without the right eyes on it — and nobody has a reason to go around the process, because the process is no longer the slow option.

Make the Right Way the Easy Way

That’s exactly how Peregrin’s requisition approval workflow is built. Project managers submit requisitions with POs queued up, your purchasing team reviews every order from a role-based approval queue, and every action is timestamped in a full activity log. Your PMs move fast; you keep control.

If maverick spend is eating your margins — or you honestly can’t tell whether it is, which is its own answer — book a demo to see the approval workflow in action, or sign up for early access to put it to work in your shop.