Your financial platform's true power isn't just its feature list, but its fundamental design. Understanding how Brex was engineered specifically for accounting workflows — from its core sub-ledger to its AI automation — can unlock significant efficiency gains.

This article dives into Brex's accounting-first architecture to reveal why it works the way it does, and crucially, provides actionable takeaways on how you can fully leverage our integrated Accounting Journal, native ERP connections, accrual capabilities, and automation features to streamline coding, accelerate your close, and gain proactive control. Let’s translate architectural insight into immediate workflow improvements.

Brex’s guiding principles for accounting.

Why the relentless focus on accounting from day one? Because we recognized that the biggest competitor wasn't another fintech, but the spreadsheet — powerful, flexible, but disconnected. To deliver real automation and control, financial tools need an accounting-centric design. This led to core principles guiding Brex's development, all aimed at making your job easier:

• Scalability built in: We serve 30,000+ customers from startups to enterprises, and our platform is designed to scale with you.
• Accounting everywhere: Every transaction has an accounting implication. Brex ensures accounting considerations are embedded across cards, reimbursements, bill pay, and travel, creating a unified system rather than siloed tools.
• Flexibility matters: No two accounting teams work identically. Brex prioritizes flexibility, allowing you to tailor workflows and data models to your specific business needs while incorporating best practices.
• Automation as the goal: Manual tasks drain valuable time. Brex is engineered to automate routine work, freeing your team for higher-value analysis and strategy, especially crucial amidst the accountant shortage.
• Bringing accounting upstream: Why wait until month-end to ensure compliance and accurate coding? Brex embeds controls and categorization before the transaction fully settles, turning downstream reconciliation into a smoother, faster process.

With those principles laid out, let’s walk through the layers of value accounting teams can extract from Brex.

Layer 1: The Accounting Journal — an intuitive interface built on a powerful engine.

Traditional accounting software can feel clunky. Brex Accounting Journal was designed as the central hub for accountants, prioritizing a clean, intuitive experience without sacrificing power. It’s more than just a view of transactions; it’s built for how finance teams actually work:

• Clear workflow stages: Built-in tabs for data preparation, review, and export history support proper separation of duties.
• Team collaboration: Commenting and feedback loops streamline the review process directly within the platform.
• Robust auditing: Track all actions and data changes for clear accountability.
• Deep ERP integration: Fully code transactions before exporting, minimizing rework in your ERP.
• Scalable processing: Bulk actions and powerful filtering handle thousands of transactions efficiently.
• Error-free exports: Accounting Journal ensures a transaction can only be exported once, and that no transaction goes missing.

Actionable takeaway: Stop exporting CSVs and manually manipulating the data in Excel. Use the Accounting Journal as your daily hub for efficient transaction coding, applying bulk actions, managing review workflows, and preparing streamlined exports.

Layer 2: The Accounting Record — the power of a proprietary sub-ledger.

What makes this smooth interface possible and reliable, especially as complexity grows? Under the hood lies the Accounting Record, a proprietary sub-ledger built and optimized by Brex over several years. Unlike systems simply passing expense data along, the Accounting Record:

• Simplifies complexity: Ingests data from cards, reimbursements, bills, etc., and correctly handles scenarios where one event (like a card swipe) generates multiple accounting entries (essential for accruals and amortizations).
• Ensures accuracy: Provides a full history, auditability, and immutability crucial for financial integrity. It enables features like idempotency when writing to your ERP, preventing duplicate entries even if errors occur and allowing updates to flow through reliably.
• Future-proofs your workflow: Owning this layer allows Brex to build advanced features (like native amortization) and ensures accurate double-entry, accrual-based bookkeeping representation directly within Brex, paving the way for a continuous close.

Benefits: You get confidence in data accuracy, support for complex accounting, a reliable audit trail, and a platform ready for future needs, without relying on bolted-on third-party tools for core functions.

Actionable takeaway: Go deeper by exploring Accounting Journal's advanced capabilities, such as processing accruals directly within Brex. Your team will avoid manual calculations and journal entry work during close and save significant time.

“I’m very thankful for Brex accruals — it’s helped us shorten our close because we were doing a lot of manual accruals in the past. Sometimes it would take us a whole day just to do them. With Brex, we can get our accruals done with the push of a button. It’s working really seamlessly and helps us move so much faster.” — Cindy Nunez, Senior Accounting Manager, DoorDash

Layer 3: Intelligent automation — accelerating your workflows.

Once you leverage our Accounting Journal and the power of its sub-ledger, it’s time to turn on Brex's powerful AI-powered automations to truly transform accounting tasks:

• Automated transaction coding: Set rules at multiple levels (card, vendor, employee, custom dimensions) to automatically categorize spending as it happens.
• Customizable fields: Use any field from your ERP or HRIS to automate accounting, automatically provision cards, or update your policy.
• AI-powered suggestions: Machine learning models trained on millions of transactions proactively suggest coding rules and mappings.
  • Proof points: Brex customers accept over 90% of AI suggestions, and over 65% of all expenses on Brex are fully automated.
• Measurable time savings: This combination significantly reduces manual data entry, minimizes coding errors, and drastically simplifies month-end close.
  • Proof points: The average Brex customer saves 312 hours per year on accounting and compliance, and AI helps accelerate month-end close by 3x.

Benefit: Shift your team from reactive data entry to proactive oversight and strategic analysis.

Actionable takeaway: Use Brex’s intelligence proactively. Review the AI-powered rule suggestions regularly — accepting or modifying them trains the system to improve accuracy over time. More importantly, visit the Automations page to configure rules that pre-code transactions upstream. Apply logic based on the card or spend limit, vendor, user, or category before the transaction even settles. This is key to minimizing manual categorization and truly accelerating your close cycle.

Layer 4: Seamless ERP integrations — native connections that drive automation.

Accurate data needs to flow smoothly into your system of record. Brex made a strategic decision to build native and deep ERP integrations. Our significant investments here have resulted in industry-best partnerships, including being named NetSuite's partner of the year. Why does this matter to you?

• Deeper functionality: Native connections allow for richer data exchange (like writing journal entries directly, which is essential for accruals) and more flexibility (custom field mapping).
• Enhanced reliability and performance: Our direct integrations are optimized for fast data transfers (up to 20x faster than using third-party tools) and robust error handling.
• Streamlined support: If issues arise, you're dealing directly with Brex support, not navigating multiple vendors, or debugging spreadsheet imports/exports.
• Broad compatibility: Brex offers robust, flexible integrations with leading ERPs (NetSuite, QuickBooks Online, Sage Intacct, Oracle Fusion, Xero, Workday) supporting various export formats (credit card transactions, vendor bills, journal entries).

Benefits: Fast onboarding, less friction in data syncs, workflows that match your ERP setup, and quick resolution if support is needed.

Actionable takeaway: Maximize data integrity between Brex and your source of truth. Ensure your ERP integration is fully configured by importing your chart of accounts and relevant segment fields (like departments, classes, locations) directly into Brex. This enables precise, fully coded transactions before export, leveraging the deep integration to minimize errors and manual adjustments in your ERP.

Bringing it all together for unmatched accounting excellence.

Brex isn't just software; it's an integrated financial operating system engineered with accounting at its core. From the intuitive Accounting Journal interface, powered by the robust Accounting Record sub-ledger, to deep, native ERP integrations and intelligent automation, each layer is designed to provide tangible value, underpinned by actionable ways to leverage this accounting-first architecture. This deep investment in product innovation is what makes our accounting automation solution a differentiator for leading businesses.

As Kevin Leja, Controller at Brex customer AG1, puts it, “Brex is set up as if it was designed by accountants, and it’s helped cut our close from 12 days to 5 days.” That’s the power of an accounting-first approach — transforming workflows and empowering finance teams to spend smarter and move faster.

Want to go deeper on modern accounting challenges and how top finance leaders are solving them? Check out our accounting podcast hosted by Brex Chief Accounting Officer Erik Zhou, who breaks down many of the macro themes covered in this piece. Or sign up for Brex to get started and automate your accounting today.