The era of tedious expense reports, paper receipts, manual reviews, and policies no one reads is finally coming to an end. Brex is ushering in the era of intelligent finance — an AI-native system that eliminates finance busywork and makes compliance effortless.

Intelligent finance leverages AI to remove all the manual expense and accounting burdens that have historically slowed operations down. It learns and enforces expense policies, completes expense reports and reviews, and simplifies accounting so employees and finance teams can focus on work that’s more worthy of human brain power.

Best of all, intelligent finance gets smarter with every interaction and can anticipate what needs to be done and suggest a course of action or even autonomously take action on your behalf. The power of your team will be multiplied. Welcome to the next frontier of finance.

What exactly is intelligent finance?

Intelligent finance is a revolutionary, AI-native approach to financial operations from Brex. It adds layers of learning, context, and autonomous decision-making to accelerate finance on a global scale.

While traditional automation executes “if this, then that” logic, intelligent finance goes five steps further. It doesn’t just run rules. It looks for and understands patterns, asks questions when things don’t match, and improves over time.

Brex AI monitors your spending, receives your responses to alerts and suggestions, and syncs with your ERP, HRIS, and other tools. And it begins to understand the story behind every transaction. It learns your norms, flags deviations, and suggests ways to fill gaps even without prompting.

The result is that companies gain both operational speed and financial control simultaneously, finally breaking the age-old tradeoff. Companies on Brex routinely process expenses 9 times faster, maintain ~98% employee policy compliance, and close accounting cycles 3 times faster.

8 ways intelligent finance transforms your business

1. Autonomously completes expenses

With Brex’s intelligent finance platform, every employee gets an AI Assistant that functions like a personal assistant embedded in the expense workflow. When someone charges dinner, books travel, or purchases supplies, the Assistant kicks in. It automatically generates a receipt, identifies participants from calendar invites, drafts a memo from context, assigns category and GL codes, and more. All without anyone ever needing to open an expense form.

If something’s missing, the AI Assistant will ask the employee for clarification or documentation directly in the expense line item. If the issue can’t be resolved, it will hand the complete case with context attached to a manager. Over time, the Assistant learns your company’s preferences and style as well.

The friction of expense reporting disappears for employees and managers. For finance teams, compliance and consistency become the default, not the exception.

“Brex has made a huge impact. The pre-filled memos, the auto-categorization, the AI suggestions — it all enables a more productive team. Their constant AI rollouts are helping us move faster.” — Sophie Chiang, Lead Accounting Manager, Plaid

2. Enforces expense policy compliance in real time

Instead of overlaying policy checks after the fact, Brex intelligent finance enforces your expense controls at the moment of spend. That’s because you can precode your rules for spending amounts, merchants, categories, and locations into Brex cards, and they’re validated instantly at the moment of purchase. Brex’s AI can even catch subtle violations — a per diem just over the threshold, or an odd merchant slip — that manual review often misses.

Employees can ask the Assistant policy questions in plain language, such as “What’s my travel meal allowance?”, and get immediate answers. Managers only have to review flagged cases that require judgment. This approach reduces the manager burden, cuts back-and-forth, and keeps behavior consistent with policy.

“It was so nice to upload our policy and let Brex auto-enforce it at every swipe. It’s minimal work for our employees and managers to submit and approve expenses every month.” — Jessica Ray, Controller, Pramand

3. Accelerates accounting from end to end

In preparation to close the books each month, every expense needs to be coded, reconciled, and exported. Brex’s intelligent finance accelerates all of that with accounting automation. AI suggests GL codes and merchant mappings based on your historical data and custom fields. It converts expenses into ERP-ready journal entries in real time. If something looks off, such as a duplicate entry or inconsistent vendor, it flags it for human intervention before it reaches your ledger.

With Brex’s two-way integrations with systems like NetSuite, QuickBooks, and Sage Intacct, your books will automatically update as employees spend. As a result, finance teams can close in a fraction of the time with fewer manual steps and fewer errors.

“With Brex, I can create custom rules that do the work for me. By auto-mapping merchants to specific departments in NetSuite and auto-categorizing expenses, Brex saves us so much time.” — Stacey Dearden, Accountant, BambooHR

4. Simplifies and saves on business travel

Business travel used to require a dreaded post-trip ritual: gathering crumpled receipts, matching them to expenses, writing memos, adding attendees one by one, and so on. But intelligent finance means employees don’t even have to think about that process — it just happens.

When someone books or pays for travel, Brex matches receipts, applies policies, and routes everything correctly. Through calendar and HR integrations, it understands who you met, where you went, and why, making per diems, allocations, and tax settings automatic.

No more late-night expense report marathons. Travel becomes just another routine spend, handled by the system.

“Brex adds a whole new level of efficiency to travel and expense management.” — Kayla Young, PhD, COO, Phase Genomics

5. Delivers real-time visibility and insight

With intelligent finance, spending is visible as it happens — not only as historical data. Brex surfaces reporting dashboards that highlight patterns, spot anomalies, and recommend reallocation when needed. You can type in natural-language queries like “Give me marketing expenses > $5,000 last quarter” and get instant insight.

Brex can suggest budget reallocations based on spending patterns. If marketing is under budget while engineering overshoots, the system can suggest shifting resources. Companies using Brex report staying ~97% on budget and reclaiming hundreds or thousands of hours previously spent chasing and reconciling data.

“The ah-ha moment for me as a finance leader was that I can put everything in Brex. Everything can be controlled by a budget. If spending is approaching limits in one area, I know in real time and can talk to leaders about possible tradeoffs.” — Andrew Maher, Head of Finance, Superhuman

6. Automates user onboarding and offboarding

As companies scale, inviting new users, maintaining permissions, assigning cards, and updating policies becomes more complex. With intelligent finance, Brex integrates with over 40 HRIS systems so new hires get the right cards, spending limits, and rules immediately. When employees leave, access is revoked automatically.

This automation works across global regions, currencies, and compliance regimes. Finance doesn’t get tangled in permissions and provisioning; the system handles it.

“With Brex, we can give each employee a unique card number and issue specific spend limits with built-in controls. We can set automatic expirations or close cards in a single click. It’s especially useful as the headcount goes up or down.” — Adam Alpert, Co-founder, Pangea

7. Automates accounts payable and vendor workflows

Intelligent finance handles vendor-side expense flows too. Brex bill pay digitizes invoices, extracts line-item data, classifies them, and routes them for approval. It checks for duplicates or anomalies before payments go out. Payments — whether via card or ACH — flow through the same policy engine you use for expense spend.

This unified approach gives a full, accurate view of all outflows. No more mismatch between AP and expense management software. Everything stays under one roof and under one set of controls.

"With the AI bill pay scanning capability, it takes me 30 seconds to input a bill because most of it is pre-populated in Brex. Now I can simply forward emails and manage receipts effortlessly, all within a single platform,” — Michael Robinson, COO at SWARM Engineering

8. Audits every transaction as it happens

Audits used to be backward-looking and catch-up efforts. Now auditing is continuous and automated. Brex’s AI reviews each transaction in real time, looking for duplicates, unusual vendors, or policy deviations. Issues are flagged immediately. Mastercard’s monitoring complements that layer of protection. Every approval, edit, or exception is also logged automatically, creating a complete audit trail as spend occurs.

Finance teams can intervene early to stop unwanted spend before it starts — not when errors have already done damage.

“Two months after going live with Brex, we fired someone for buying personal things on their Brex card. They didn’t understand how much more visibility we had with Brex.” — Matt Bailey, Senior Procurement Manager, leading independent bottling company

A platform that learns and adapts

Each transaction helps Brex’s intelligent finance platform serve you more accurately and autonomously. Over time, it better understands your spending patterns, vendor behavior, and policy nuances. When you start a new project, it can suggest budget allocations based on past, similar initiatives. As you expand internationally, it adapts to local tax rules, currencies, and compliance requirements.

Beneath the surface, Brex AI combines machine learning for anomaly detection, large language models for context and memo generation, and integrations (Google Calendar, HRIS, ERP) for continuity and situational awareness. Your data remains private — Brex does not use it to train external AI models.

Speed and control: your new competitive edge

The beauty of intelligent finance lies in its invisibility. Employees don't think about expense reports, because they're already done. Managers don't waste time reviewing compliant expenses, because they're already approved. Finance teams don't chase missing receipts, because they're already collected and coded.

This is finance that works the way finance should have always worked: in the background, without friction, enabling business rather than constraining it. It's transparent when you need visibility, autonomous when you don't, and always learning to serve your business better.

In today’s economy, winners move fast without losing control. Intelligent finance delivers both, transforming finance from a cost center into a driver of growth.

The only question: will you get there before your competitors? Book a demo at brex.com/sales.