How Honest Health built vendor governance across five teams and saved $30K on one renewal

TL;DR

As Honest Health grew, so did its need for a more structured vendor management process. Senior Finance Operations Manager Robin Pendergast partnered with five internal teams to build a formal approval workflow in SpendHound, now used to vet every new vendor and renewal across 200 contracts. SpendHound’s pricing benchmarks helped Honest Health save $30,000 on a single renewal, and Robin estimates about half of the pricing analyses surface a savings opportunity worth 10% or more.

Meet Honest Health: Value-based care, built to scale fast

Honest Health is a value-based care enablement organization that partners with health systems and providers to improve patient outcomes while reducing costs. Backed by Rubicon Founders, the company is quickly growing its partnerships with health systems and providers, creating a need for internal processes that can scale alongside Honest Health’s growth.

Robin Pendergast, Senior Finance Operations Manager, supports cost savings, vendor approvals, and contract negotiations at Honest Health. Before joining the company she worked as a web developer designing workflow logic — experience that played a big part as her team evolved its vendor management with SpendHound.

The challenge: Scaling vendor governance alongside company growth

When Robin joined Honest Health, the company didn't have a vendor approval or management system yet. Employees bought the software and services they needed on separate cards, and Robin saw those purchases when they showed up on expense reports.

“Everybody used their own card to buy whatever they needed. They did it themselves, so it didn't go through the required approval process that we had documented.” — Robin Pendergast, Sr. Finance Operations Manager, Honest Health

As Honest Health grew, vendor management got more complex across a larger organization. The manual process couldn't deliver consistent visibility into vendors, contracts, costs, and ownership across teams.

Finance saw a chance to bring more structure to the process and make it easier for the teams behind vendor decisions to work together. The goal was an approach that could keep pace as the company kept scaling.

Pricing was the other opportunity. Without real benchmarks, the team couldn't see how its vendor pricing compared with similar organizations, so it was hard to know how much room a negotiation had.

“We were at the mercy of the vendor. We might have negotiated down a little bit, but we didn't know what our potential was.” — Robin Pendergast, Sr. Finance Operations Manager, Honest Health

Robin made closing both gaps a priority. Shortly into her role, she started looking for a vendor management solution that could add structure and pricing visibility to what she was tracking by hand.

The solution: A five-team vendor approval workflow, built in SpendHound

Robin found SpendHound in January 2025. Two things about it got her attention: it was free for Honest Health’s team of fewer than 1,000 employees, and it included the exact kind of pricing benchmarks she needed heading into renewals. A competitor came along later, but by then she “didn’t even entertain it.”

When SpendHound launched vendor approvals, Robin had already loaded contracts and software spend data into the platform and started building immediately. Her prior career as a web developer turned out to be especially useful: she worked with SpendHound on the workflow logic, helping define which approval tier a contract needed based on size and risk.

Then Robin brought in project management, compliance, security, IT, and legal — five teams in total — so her workflows met what each of them required. Today, roughly 200 Honest Health vendors and contracts run through SpendHound, and every vendor (even one-offs) is routed through the same approval process.

“Legal, accounting, IT, compliance, security — they all love SpendHound, because some of them had nothing before. They had no visibility. SpendHound has made everybody's life easier.” — Robin Pendergast, Sr. Finance Operations Manager, Honest Health

The clearest payoff came on a single Dell renewal. Honest Health benchmarked their pricing with SpendHound, and its VP of IT took that data directly into the negotiation with Dell, resulting in a $30,000 reduction on a single renewal. As Robin put it, the benchmarking simply told her, “other companies your size with the same features are getting a better price.”

The results:

• $30,000 saved on a single contract renewal, using SpendHound's pricing benchmarks
• 200 vendors and contracts tracked and routed through one centralized approval workflow
• 5 cross-functional teams aligned under a single vendor management process
• 50% of pricing analyses surface a savings opportunity, typically worth 10% or more once negotiated

When asked what SpendHound has done for Honest Health, Robin didn’t hesitate:

“Every growing company has a little wild west in it. With SpendHound, we now have structure around vendor management and contract renewals, and better pricing data to negotiate from.” — Robin Pendergast, Sr. Finance Operations Manager, Honest Health

That structure now crosses nearly every team at the company. Legal, accounting, compliance, IT, and security all direct their vendor requests to SpendHound rather than fielding them individually.

While the Dell renewal is the example that comes to mind first, it’s not an isolated case. Robin estimates that about half of the pricing analyses SpendHound runs yield a savings opportunity, and those typically turn up 10% savings or more once negotiated. Honest Health simply didn’t have that leverage before.

Accounting now uses SpendHound as a gut check before anything gets paid. If a vendor hasn’t cleared the approval process, the invoice doesn’t go through — simple, but effective for a startup adding new vendors every month.

Looking ahead: Scaling vendor intelligence across more portfolio companies

Honest Health is still scaling, with more partners in the pipeline and a $140 million raise led by NewSpring and supported by K2 HealthVentures, Rubicon Founders, Oak HC/FT, Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, and Durable Capital Partners. Because of this Robin expects the number of vendors routing through SpendHound to keep climbing.

She’s also started using SpendHound beyond Honest Health’s four walls. As part of Rubicon Founders’ portfolio, Robin shares vendor intelligence with fellow portfolio companies when there's an opening for shared negotiating leverage — comparing notes on vendors and seeking volume deals neither could get alone. It’s the direction Robin sees SpendHound’s value expanding next: from one company’s vendor governance to leverage across an entire portfolio.

Take back control of your vendor spend

Honest Health strengthened vendor governance with a five-team approval workflow and saved $30K on a single renewal.

SpendHound gives finance teams one place to manage AI & SaaS spend, automate approvals, and benchmark vendor pricing against what companies like yours actually pay.

Get started for free and put structure around vendor management before your AI & SaaS spend outruns you.

SpendHound is free for companies with fewer than 1,000 employees. Companies with 1,000–5,000 employees pay $10,000 per year, backed by a guarantee to identify at least $150,000 in savings or your money back. See pricing.