Rogue spend is typically defined as spending associated with staffing suppliers outside pre-negotiated contracts or your company’s contingent workforce program guidelines. How can you manage these financials better?

Having control of your company’s spend and finance is mission critical. Knowing how much money is moving between departments, suppliers, or being spent, is vital. Rogue spend can be financially draining, inefficient and ineffective, however, they are a few ways you can keep your costs more predictable and less sporadic.

Having accurate reporting, goals clearly set, and accountability, will aid your oversight of hiring, and focusing on these concepts can help keep finances under control. Below are a few ways to manage your rogue spend.

Identify & Analyze Your Rogue Spend

Seeing your costs at the end of the month higher than you’d predicted can be a shock, but it is not enough to just know where the costs are high. The reason for the rogue spend needs to be identified and explained, allowing potential rogue spend to be prevented in future months.

Accounting for all staffing expenditures, from large to small, is an important first step to ensuring the talent budget is being followed meticulously. Establish department accountability by making sure there is concise tracking of staffing expenditures, and decisions are recorded with responsibilities assigned. This information will be helpful when analyzing rogue spend going forward.

Precisely Tracking Spending

Having accurate tracking of your staffing costs is a primary step in improving overall contingent workforce management, and will help limit rogue spending. The next step is to ensure everything is accounted for. A couple of examples of common rogue spends would be paying staffing vendors you aren’t working with anymore or timesheet errors and even fraud, in some cases. Empirically, rogue spend leads to substantially higher hourly bill rates since this kind of spend is not properly governed, managed or competed.

Ensuring that all spending is suitable to cover staffing needs can be a time consuming process. Having the ability to review previous spends with ease, and in great detail, allows for the identification of rogue spend. The organization of contingent staffing records will pay for itself in the long run.

Keeping Finances Up-To-Date

Outdated finances can lead to rogue spend falling through the cracks, and can leave it unnoticed for months, thus keeping your finances up to date is crucial. The time spent organizing finances will generate a good ROI.

Having a solid understanding of both incoming and outgoing resources helps to identifying problems. Establishing accuracy and conservation throughout your company is the only way to properly deal with rogue spend over your company’s lifetime. Gathering information allows for more calculated and informed decisions, to keep your finances out of the red, and into the black.

Finding the Balance

After sorting financials, you want to work with the people in charge of staffing decisions. You want to make sure all your employees involved in hiring contingent workers understand the goal, and are committed to finding the most cost effective solutions or tactics. In context for example, if you are searching for a new hire, finding an equally capable candidate at a lower rate is worth the additional search.

Implementing a VMS (Vendor Management Solution) provides visibility, allows you access fair market rates, and ensures vendor compliance.

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Adapting your company’s contractor staffing spend or processes, can help reduce your overspending and in turn, reign in your rogue spend. HCMWorks provides comprehensive and customizable contingent workforce solutions to help professionals in HR and Procurement. Find out how we can help you, contact us.