Earlier this month, I attended a Procurement Strategies & Innovation 2026 workshop led by procurement thought leader and Soldo partner Tom Mills. The room was a cross-section of the industry, with different sectors, company sizes and businesses at every stage of procurement maturity. Yet the conversation quickly settled on shared ground.
Someone described it as a therapy session, as the frustrations being raised were ones everyone recognised. That kind of candour is often two things: rare in a professional setting and incredibly useful.
When experienced procurement leaders from different businesses arrive at the same conclusions, individual challenges begin to appear as systemic ones.
Tail spend is a time AND money problem
Tom Mills opened the workshop by asking the group to define tail spend. The answers varied from decentralised spend and maverick purchasing to off-contract activity. One response captured it best: “It’s the thing that takes up too much time.”
The problem with tail spend is the cumulative overhead it creates, rather than the individual transaction.
When the group mapped what sits behind a typical low-value purchase, the list was longer than most people outside procurement would expect: supplier onboarding, data cleansing, PO processing, payment handling, risk review, accountability gaps and retrospective compliance correction.
One item on the list drew particular recognition: managing internal politics. It doesn’t appear in any procurement framework, yet the time spent navigating stakeholder tensions and resolving disputes over purchasing decisions is significant and often unmeasured.
Procurement processes haven’t kept pace with how buying works
Employees need to move quickly; businesses need tighter control over spend. Procurement sits between those two requirements. So, when processes are not built for that reality, the function ends up putting out fires rather than doing anything strategic.
Most procurement leaders in the room were experienced, ambitious and clear about where they could add value. The constraint is structural. Governance models built for slower, centralised buying patterns struggle to keep pace with how businesses operate today.
Our data reflects this. According to Soldo’s Spend Index (Spring 2026), operational spend accounted for 63% of transactions in 2025 and continued to grow year on year. These are software subscriptions, small services, and everyday purchases that keep work moving, are high-volume, distributed across departments and difficult to govern through processes built for strategic sourcing.
When visibility arrives after the transaction rather than before it, control becomes reactive. Teams chase receipts and manually manage exceptions rather than preventing them. Month-end becomes a reconciliation exercise.
The strategic work procurement actually wants to do
The conversation at Procurement Strategies & Innovation 2026 made one thing clear: the strategic ambition is there. Nobody in the room was short of ideas about where they could add value: stronger supplier relationships, more proactive risk management, closer collaboration with the business, better use of spend intelligence to inform commercial negotiations.
These leaders lack the capacity to pursue that work, because too much time is consumed managing operational tail spend. Procurement ends up spending most of its effort on the lowest-value activity, while the work that genuinely requires procurement expertise gets squeezed into whatever time is left.
Being asked to deliver cost savings without adequate visibility into where spend is occurring makes this harder.
Getting governance upstream
The procurement teams making real progress are redesigning control around the flow of work itself, rather than bolting on approval layers. If businesses embed policy into payment, governance operates before money leaves the business, rather than after.
In practice, this means assigning budgets to teams and projects in advance, setting spending limits, and capturing receipts and context at the time of purchase.
With this system, teams know what they are authorised to spend and can act with confidence. Procurement has assurance that policy is being applied consistently without needing to intervene in every transaction.
We describe this at Soldo as proactive programming. It shifts the function from corrective to preventive and requires aligning governance mechanisms with the business’s current spend patterns.
Keeping up with where the business is going
Decentralised spending will keep growing and distributed teams will continue to make purchasing decisions. Subscription models will push transaction volumes higher even when overall budgets hold flat.
Procurement’s ability to influence the organisation depends on governance that matches those conditions.
The leaders I spoke with at PSI are ready to make that shift
They need operating models and tools that make proactive governance practical at scale, spending less time investigating and more time shaping what happens next.
