Tail spend (sometimes referred to as off-contract spend) purchases are often not visible until they appear in an organisation’s end-of-year accounts and can cause significant budget pressures if not controlled. These purchases are usually made by members of staff outside of an organisation’s more formal procurement practices.
Whilst tail spend is often referred to as low value spend, this is not always the case. Tail spend can take a lot of different forms. It contains spending that presents risks and inefficiencies to government buyers, including:
- low price, high frequency: these are items that have low individual value, but over time, are a significant amount of spend
- low price, low frequency: items at the far end of the tail of spending
- misclassified spending: items that are individually purchased and should be consolidated into existing supply contracts and competition systems
- fragmented spending: items that are repeatedly purchased by various parts of the organisation that could be consolidated
- Maverick spending: spending that falls outside of the organisation’s procurement guidelines
- Unaddressed spending: items that have not been addressed by procurement in a reasonable period (generally considered to be two to three years)
- Unusual spending: high value items that are new procurements or are procured only once, or so rarely that the organisation’s procurement staff has no expertise in the area
Please see our ‘Products and suppliers’ section below for product category availability.
This agreement will give your organisation the ability to control your tail spend by providing you with an end-to-end management service. This includes:
- the digital buying platform (which allows you to filter by social value criteria such as vendor diversity and provides the ability to include permissions and approvals into the existing hierarchy structures)
- managing the supply chain of tail spend products from procurement to payment
- buyer registrations for your organisation
- support and management information to help you report on spend, this could also help your organisation make more strategic purchasing decisions in the future
This is a single supplier agreement at present, the platform provides:
- a simple user experience that is compliant with government buying standards
- an extensive range of products
- a dynamic and pre-vetted supply base which will change with market demands (specific vetting processes available on request)
As part of the buying platform, you can decide what level of approval any specific buyer in your organisation has. You have the option to set permissions and organise your user accounts by category or specific products, and through personalised approval levels. You can change the features of your individual or departmental user accounts, based on criteria such as:
- availability of product categories
- availability of specific products
- approval levels
- spend limits
- area of business
- multiple delivery points
- job title or grade of staff members
- social value initiatives, for example: vendor diversity, Carbon Net Zero and buying local
All public sector organisations can use this agreement to address varied requirements. This has a maximum contract length of 4 years, plus the period of your implementation where appropriate.
For more information about this process, you should read the buyer guide in the documents section at the bottom of this page.
