How to build a wellness stipend on Brex

Tens of thousands of companies use Brex for their employee benefit programs, including ourselves! The key is Brex’s versatile spend limits that let you issue spend for specific purposes with policies baked in, such as merchant restrictions, transaction caps, allowable categories, and more. Superhuman even set up a food stipend on Brex.

Setting up benefit stipends on Brex is a great way to save time and money, while delighting employees. Here’s how it’s done.

Create a spend limit called “Wellness Stipend” for an amount that matches your benefit policy. We find that customers most often do $200/month. You can set a hard or flexible limit and configure it to recur so funds refresh automatically. You can also set funds to expire or roll over.

These customizations help you control the timing of how employees spend, such as ensuring they use or lose it monthly vs. storing it up for big purchases at year end.

This is where spend limits really earn their keep. You can embed category and merchant controls directly into the spend limit so that off-policy purchases are declined at the point of sale, not caught weeks later through manual review.

For a wellness stipend, you'd typically allow categories like:

• Health and fitness clubs / gyms
• Spas and massage services
• Sporting goods
• Health and wellness apps

And block everything else. Employees will be able to easily see the policy associated with the limit in the Brex dashboard or app, so it’s easy to know what’s allowed. This will spare you from endless “Can I expense this?” questions and perhaps stop employees from trying to pass off a flight to Vegas as self-care.

Once you set the amount, cadence, and controls, you can assign the spend limit to the relevant employees. You can also set it to be auto-assigned to all new employees, even easier when your HRIS is linked to Brex.

Virtual cards linked to the wellness spend limit are issued automatically; employees don't have to request anything. You can also allow them to use their existing Brex card and assign expenses to their Wellness Stipend Limit.

If they prefer (and you allow), they can also submit a reimbursement against the spend limit for out-of-pocket purchases, like a gym class they paid for in cash.

In Brex, you can use preconfigured policies with common rules around receipts, memos, and approvals, or build custom policies to get as granular as you want.

For example, for a wellness stipend, you can forgo requiring receipts and memos, or require them for expenses over a certain amount. Transactions that fall within the approved categories will be auto-approved by Brex AI. No manual review or micromanagement required.

For internal auditing, you can run a quarterly report on the spend limit to review usage, check for necessary employee repayments, or export your spend limits to leverage the data in other systems.

Brex can automatically tag every wellness stipend transaction with the correct GL code, so transactions are ready to sync to your accounting system without manual intervention. This enables accounting automation and makes the month-end faster for everyone.

Wellness stipends are typically treated as a taxable employee benefit, so you'll need to report the amounts to payroll each quarter for proper withholding. The workflow is straightforward:

1. Filter transactions by your "Wellness Stipend" spend limit in Brex.
2. Export the quarter's transactions to CSV.
3. Pivot by employee.
4. Import the totals into your payroll system.

Check with your tax advisor on the specifics for your company.

Remember to list the wellness stipend on your careers page under benefits and perks. Benefits like this move the needle for candidates, and a dedicated Brex card makes it feel like a real perk, not a reimbursement hassle.

The old way of running a wellness benefit where employees submit receipts, finance reviews and reimburses, accounting closes the loop manually is slow and error-prone. The Brex spend limits approach flips it: controls are embedded upfront, spend is auto-approved when it's in-policy, and the accounting happens automatically.

Finance gets real-time visibility. Employees get a card that just works. And nobody's chasing receipts for a gym membership. To learn more or watch a quick demo, get in touch here.