How to Reduce Maverick Spend and Enforce Budgets

Maverick spend — travel and expense purchases made outside approved channels or negotiated contracts — remains one of the most persistent challenges in corporate finance. Research published in The State of Corporate Travel and Expense 2026, a report from Skift and Navan, shows that a significant share of business travel bookings occur off-platform. That weakens negotiating power, distorts forecasts, and creates budget overruns finance teams may only see after the money is gone.

Most employees aren’t ignoring policy on purpose. Low levels of compliance often occur when booking tools create friction, approval workflows delay decisions, and the approved path can’t compete with consumer-grade alternatives. Tighter policy language alone doesn’t close that gap.

That’s why stronger programs move enforcement earlier, into the booking flow and the point of swipe, where spending decisions happen. When controls show up at those moments, finance teams address maverick spend before it becomes a budget surprise.

Why Maverick Spend Persists Despite Clear Policies

The gap between policy awareness and booking compliance is the central challenge. Even if travelers know the ins and outs of their travel policy, a large share still book outside approved channels. Friction, timing, and tool design push them off-platform — and those breakdowns happen before finance has much chance to intervene. Three root causes account for the majority of off-platform bookings.

Booking Friction Pushes Travelers Off-Platform

Booking friction can send travelers to consumer sites before policy has any chance to work. When a corporate booking tool takes longer or surfaces fewer options than a consumer site, employees route around it. Traveler experience strongly influences booking tool adoption. If your booking tool feels clunky compared to what travelers use for personal trips, adoption suffers, regardless of how well the policy is communicated.

The 2026 Skift and Navan report found that 80% of the business travelers surveyed sometimes book off-platform. That pattern points to a UX issue as much as a compliance one.

Approval Bottlenecks Create Workarounds

Slow approvals create a second path to maverick spend by making compliant booking feel impractical. Multi-step approval workflows, particularly those requiring multiple handoffs, introduce delays that push travelers toward faster alternatives. When employees need to book last-minute travel and the approval chain takes too long, they’ll use a consumer site and submit an expense report later. From the traveler’s perspective, that workaround makes sense, but it moves the booking entirely outside your company’s managed channel.

Post-Trip Enforcement Catches Problems Too Late

Post-trip enforcement leaves finance teams reacting after the money is already spent. Traditional expense management relies on reviewing reports after travel is complete and money has been spent. By the time a non-compliant booking surfaces in an expense report, there’s no cost to recover, only a violation to flag. It also creates a visibility gap: Finance teams may not see unmanaged charges for a prolonged period, which makes real-time budget tracking difficult. Because the breakdown happens before expense review, control has to move into the booking, approval, payment, and review workflow itself.

5 Ways to Reduce Maverick Spend and Enforce Budgets

Reducing off-platform spending requires changes across policy design, the tools teams use, and traveler behavior. These five strategies start with the highest-impact controls, then layer in practices that reinforce them across the booking, approval, payment, and review workflow.

1. Move Enforcement Into the Search and Booking Flow

Pre-booking controls are among the most effective ways to reduce maverick spend. When the booking workflow embeds policy rules, surfaces compliant options by default, and requires justification for out-of-policy selections, compliance becomes the easiest path, not an extra step.

A Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ study commissioned by Navan and based on a composite organization found that Navan customers achieved a 16% average reduction in annual travel spend. Interviewees highlighted compliance guidance at the moment of selection as an effective method for steering employees toward compliant choices before charges were incurred.

Navan Travel applies this approach with its dynamic policy engine, which surfaces in-policy options alongside available rewards at the moment of search. Out-of-policy bookings are flagged for review or declined based on your company’s preset rules, before any money changes hands.

2. Give Travelers a Reason to Stay On-Platform

Incentives help reinforce policy by making compliant booking personally worthwhile. Controls on their own may not drive long-term compliance. Pairing them with incentives helps shift traveler behavior by making on-platform booking personally rewarding, not just organizationally required.

The Skift and Navan report found that 72% of the travelers surveyed would book less expensive hotels if offered financial incentives. Yet very few companies offer such programs. That makes incentives one of the clearest underused ways to reduce maverick spend.

Navan Rewards addresses this gap directly. When travelers book below the displayed “Price to Beat,” they earn rewards for personal travel. The program also inverts the typical dynamic where employees are incentivized to spend up to the policy cap rather than below it. Combined with dynamic policies and competitive rates, this helps reduce T&E costs.

3. Automate Approval Routing to Eliminate Bottlenecks

Automated routing helps remove the delays that push employees off-platform. Because slow approvals are a leading driver of off-platform bookings, this step matters most after booking friction is under control. When you automate routing based on trip cost, category, and policy rules, requests reach the right approver without manual forwarding, and low-risk bookings that meet defined parameters can be auto-approved.

Start by auditing your current approval cycle times to identify where requests sit idle. Then configure tiered routing:

• Auto-approve in-policy bookings below a defined threshold.
• Route mid-range bookings to a single manager.
• Escalate high-cost or high-risk trips to finance leadership.

Mobile-friendly approval workflows are essential here, since delays often occur when approvers are away from their desks. With Navan, approval routing happens in real time based on configurable thresholds. The platform supports both automatic approval for compliant bookings and directed approval that routes each request to a set approver based on who is booking or the trip’s purpose.

4. Use Corporate Card Controls to Enforce Policy at the Point of Swipe

Corporate cards with real-time controls extend policy enforcement beyond the booking tool to every point of purchase. This layer is especially important for charges that occur outside the booking workflow, such as ground transportation, client meals, and hotel incidentals, where a corporate card policy is often the only enforcement mechanism.

To get the most from your card controls:

• Set merchant category code restrictions aligned to policy.
• Configure dynamic spend limits by trip, day, or category rather than relying solely on annual card limits.
• Use virtual cards to add another layer of control for specific trip authorizations.

Navan Expense captures card transaction data in real time, automatically categorizing spending using transaction context and company policy. At the point of swipe, transactions are auto-approved, flagged for review, or declined based on your company’s configured rules.

For companies with existing card programs, Navan Connect can link eligible corporate cards to the platform without requiring a card switch.

5. Replace Manual Auditing With AI-Powered Expense Review

AI-powered review helps finance teams check every transaction instead of a small sample. Traditional expense audits rely on sampling, reviewing a fraction of submitted reports and hoping the sample catches policy violations. AI-powered auditing shifts this model to full-population review, checking every transaction against configurable rules and directing reviewers only to exceptions.

The Forrester TEI study found that Navan customers experienced a 40% reduction in time spent on expense auditing and reconciliation. Navan Audit Agent checks each expense against configurable audit rules, automatically clearing compliant charges and flagging duplicates, receipt inconsistencies, and spending anomalies. This helps free your finance team to focus on the exceptions that actually require judgment rather than manually processing routine reports.

That efficiency gain matters most when approving managers can pair current budget context with decisions as they’re made, rather than reviewing spend after the fact.

How Real-Time Visibility Closes the Budget Enforcement Gap

Real-time spend tracking helps turn budget enforcement into a continuous control instead of a month-end discovery exercise. Without it, approving managers make decisions about travel requests with no current view of how much budget remains, and finance teams operate on information that may be out of date.

The Skift and Navan report quantified the disconnect: 80% of the travel and finance managers surveyed expressed confidence in their data access, yet only 40% had real-time visibility into travel and expense spending. Closing that gap starts with giving approving managers current budget utilization data while they’re reviewing a request — so when a department has consumed 85% of its quarterly travel allocation, the decision to approve a new trip is informed, not a guess.

Navan’s spend dashboards provide this view in real time:

• Charges tracked company-wide or by department, project, or event, so your finance team identifies trends before month-end close.
• Booking and expense activity in a single platform for T&E and cards, rather than across disconnected tools.
• More than 110 data points per booking and more than 130 per expense transaction, captured automatically.

That visibility also strengthens your negotiating position with suppliers. When all bookings flow through a single managed channel, procurement teams can demonstrate combined volume to preferred vendors, securing better rates that further reduce overall T&E costs. Just as importantly, it connects the controls described above into one system, giving finance tighter control of spend instead of discovering leakage after it happens.

From Leakage to Control

Reducing maverick spend depends on redesigning the workflow so compliance happens naturally, not on writing stricter policies or sending more reminders. When your enforcement moves upstream to the point of search and the point of swipe, when your travelers have a financial incentive to stay on-platform, and when your finance team has real-time visibility into every transaction, budget enforcement becomes a confirmation step rather than a discovery process.

The five strategies above reinforce one another across the same workflow:

• Pre-booking controls reduce out-of-policy selections.
• Incentives drive voluntary compliance.
• Automated approvals eliminate the bottlenecks that push travelers off-platform.
• AI-powered auditing catches what slips through.
• Real-time dashboards give you the budget context to act before problems compound.

You don’t need to implement everything at once. Start with the highest-leverage change, moving enforcement into the search and booking flow, and layer in additional controls as your program matures. The goal is a system in which staying on-platform feels easier, faster, and more rewarding than the alternative. For finance teams, that also means less manual follow-up: Navan highlights an average of 8 hours weekly saved on expense processing.