Indirect procurement is often overlooked in schools, leading to budget erosion from hidden costs, ad-hoc purchases, and limited oversight. While major expenses like curriculum and IT investments draw attention, it's the frequent, often low-value purchases (office supplies, maintenance and repairs, and services), that steadily add up.
When purchasing decisions are spread across departments and employees, it’s easy to lose track of who’s buying what. Without visibility, duplicate orders, random vendor selection, and unapproved spending become the norm. That’s how small oversights snowball into major waste.
But you don’t need to restructure your team or hire more staff to get things under control. In this blog, we’ll walk through five actionable strategies to help you manage indirect spend more effectively and improve spend accountability.
When every department uses a different method to submit purchase requests (emails, spreadsheets, paper forms), it’s nearly impossible to monitor what’s being spent, let alone why.
One campus might be ordering supplies through Amazon, while another submits a purchase by email or phone, creating a disjointed and inconsistent process.
That fragmentation leads to missed volume discounts, inconsistent vendor pricing, and purchases made outside of contracted vendor agreements, not to mention back-and-forth emails that complicate audits.
Centralizing all requests through a single system gives you a clear picture of what’s being requested across the school. It also makes it easier to enforce the use of approved or contracted vendors, apply consistent policies, route approvals properly, and ensure spending is tracked against budgets and funding sources.
You should look for procurement software that’s user-friendly for staff, yet secure and structured for finance. One that provides role-based access and department-head approvals, allowing employees to submit requests via a centralized platform, wherever they are, while finance maintains control and oversight.
A common reason for overspending in K-12 schools is that the person approving the purchase doesn’t know what’s left in the budget.
When budget tracking happens in a separate system, or worse, on a static spreadsheet, it’s disconnected from daily purchasing activity. By the time finance realizes a budget has been exceeded, the money has already been spent.
A solution to this problem is to give department heads real-time visibility into budget impact before they approve a request. That means showing available, committed, and remaining balances during the approval process, not after the fact.
For example, Fraxion provides budget visibility at the point of decision. Approvers can instantly see whether a purchase is within budget, or if it needs to be flagged. That level of visibility builds better spending habits and prevents surprises at the end of the month.
This happens all the time: when school staff don’t know where to buy, or feel pressure to “just get it done,” they often make purchases from unapproved vendors. It’s commonly known as rogue spend, and it leads to higher prices, inconsistent product quality, and extra work for finance when reconciling invoices.
Instead of sending out another reminder email about the preferred vendor list, make it easier for teachers and staff to shop from approved and familiar catalogs.
Top schools are using integrated spend management software with PunchOut catalog functionality that lets staff shop directly from familiar supplier websites (like Amazon, Lakeshore or Staples) while routing every purchase request through internal approval workflows and budget checks.
Some solutions offer custom internal catalog hosting, approved vendors, products, and negotiated pricing. This not only simplifies the buying process for teachers and staff but also enforces compliance and helps schools stay on budget.
With purchase requests, POs, receiving, and 3-way matching all managed in one system, you can streamline the full procure-to-pay process and reduce compliance risks.
Approvals are often the biggest bottleneck in school procurement. A request sits in someone’s inbox for days, or gets lost entirely, because there’s no structured workflow.
When approvals are delayed, staff are left waiting for updates—often leading to frustration and repeated email follow-ups. In some cases, they bypass controls or reorder items, resulting in unauthorized or unnecessary spend. This can lead to missed delivery windows, wasting time and resources across the organization.
Automated approval routing solves this. It helps you make sure every request is directed to the right person (or people) based on the value, department, or type of request. Additionally, it removes the guesswork and clarifies exactly who is responsible for each approval.
Your school needs a tool that lets you configure custom multi-level approval chains, complete with automated notifications and escalation paths. Whether it’s a single-step review or a complex capital expenditure purchase, you’ll know requests are moving quickly and in compliance with your policies.
Once the request is approved and the purchase made, it’s easy to simply move on. But if you’re not analyzing where your indirect spend is going, there’s a good chance you’re missing out on savings opportunities.
For example, a school might discover they’re buying the same janitorial supplies from five different vendors across campuses, each with different pricing. By consolidating to a single vendor and order, they could negotiate bulk discounts, reduce shipping costs, and minimize administrative overhead.
Finance teams need to be able to track indirect spending by employee, budget, and vendor. That kind of visibility helps you spot trends, consolidate vendor lists, and identify departments that consistently exceed budgets.
Spend analytics software offers powerful reporting tools with built-in dashboards and exportable data. The insights are at your fingertips, whether you’ll use them to prepare for a board meeting, provide transparency to funders, evaluate vendor performance, or surface maverick spend.
Indirect procurement is hard to control in schools, especially when you’re working with tight budgets and high volumes of decentralized purchases. Fraxion’s spend management platform helps schools overcome these exact challenges.
With Fraxion, school finance teams can:
The Hotchkiss School, a prestigious boarding school in Connecticut, completely transformed its procurement process by replacing outdated paper trails with Fraxion’s automated spend management platform.
Within months, they handled a 170% increase in purchase orders (PO) without expanding their team. Their faculty embraced the new system thanks to its PunchOut catalog integrations, with familiar online shopping experiences.
The school reduced unnecessary purchases, consolidated vendors, and saved up to 20% by steering spend toward pre-approved suppliers. Financial controls, audit readiness, and endowment fund tracking all improved as a result of the implementation.
Reducing procurement costs doesn’t mean locking things down with red tape. It’s about using a system that makes it easy to buy responsibly while maintaining transparency and staying on budget.
Fraxion equips K–12 schools with the tools to proactively manage spending, from real-time budget checks and automated approvals to preferred vendor catalog access, digital purchasing records, and complete audit trails.
Book a demo today to see how Fraxion can help your school get spending under control and reinvest savings into student success.
Indirect procurement refers to the purchasing of goods and services that support day-to-day school operations but are not tied to curriculum or instruction, these include office supplies, maintenance services, IT tools and infrastructure, etc.
Schools can reduce non-instructional spending by centralizing purchase requests, enabling budget checks, using preferred vendors, and automating approval workflows to prevent duplicate or unauthorized purchases.
Overspending often stems from manual processes, poor budget visibility, delayed approvals, and maverick spend. A lack of centralized oversight makes it hard to prevent issues before they occur.
Spend management platforms, such as Fraxion, help schools control indirect spend through automated approval workflows and enhanced spend visibility. Fraxion also includes internal catalog hosting and PunchOut vendor catalog integrations to guide staff to approved suppliers, as well as centralized analytics and reporting tools that provide finance teams with full visibility into spending.
Vendor compliance in school procurement ensures purchases align with approved contracts, funding requirements, and policies. It helps schools control costs, reduce risk, improve transparency, and stay accountable.
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