Expense reimbursements

Overview

We support comprehensive reimbursement capabilities for your entire global team. Even if employees happen to spend on their personal cards, you can still leverage the comprehensive approval, compliance, policy, automation, and accounting capabilities in Brex’s spend platform. The reimbursement features let you:

• Invite employees to submit reimbursement requests, even if they don't have a Brex card.
• Ensure all submitted reimbursements are to policy and have necessary compliance information.
• Approve a reimbursement in two clicks or less from your Expenses tab.
• Set up managers to approve reimbursements before they come to your finance team.
• Set up payment settings per entity, with custom funding sources, payment cycles, and accounting.
• Instantly reconcile reimbursements through our comprehensive accounting integrations.

Enable reimbursements

Account and card admins can set up reimbursements for their company by following the steps below. Note: Please first allowlist the ACH ID 9121145349.

Fund reimbursements

By default, reimbursements are processed daily. This means that your funding source will have a bulk pull once per day, and employees will receive a batched payout once per day. All of these transactions are accounted for via Cash accounting. With certain ERPs, you can customize your payment cycle as per your needs, scheduling them to occur weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. You can also set custom configurations for your separate entities. Each entity can configure its own payment configuration. When using custom payment cycles, these transactions are accounted for via Accrual accounting. Custom payment cycles can help align reimbursements with your accounting process or corporate reimbursement policy. It is important to note that payment cycles will increase the time for your employees to receive their reimbursements. For entities in countries supported by Brex for direct debit, one bulk amount covering all approved reimbursements will be pulled via local rails (i.e. ACH, SEPA) from your entity's configured funding source. For other locally funded entities, an account or card admin will need to push money to the payment instructions provided to fund the payouts. For locally funded reimbursements with EU and UK based entities, an account or card admin must authorize new employee accounts viaStrong Customer Authentication (SCA) before funding a reimbursement due to EU and UK regulations. You can see all the employee accounts that are waiting to be added by going to Accounts > Reimbursements > Make payment. Verify the one-time password and click Authorize to proceed. You’ll only be asked once for any new employee account that you’ll reimburse to in the EU and UK. Upon receipt of funding, Brex will process batched payouts to your employees. This means that if there are five approved reimbursements for $10 each for a single employee since the last payment cycle, that employee will see a single transaction for $50 to their bank account. The employee will receive communication of this payment and the reimbursements that contributed to the total of $50 received. You can set your preferred billing cycle in your dashboard and, if you have multiple entities, can customize the funding source and billing cycle per entity. This is all done in your dashboard under Accounts > Reimbursements. Here, you can click on your specific entity and choose either Make payment or Manage payments. Note: You can make a payment at any time, even mid-cycle. At the end of the cycle, the statement will reflect that the payment was initiated mid-cycle and will be accounting for the final balance.

See who can receive a reimbursement

In order for a team member to submit a reimbursement request and receive reimbursement through Brex, they must first connect a personal bank account, where they’ll receive their reimbursed payment. Account and card admins have a read-only mode to see which team members are eligible for reimbursements by following the steps below. Note: Only the employee themselves can see the status of their personal bank account connection. Step 1: In your dashboard, go to Team. Step 2: Click on the name of any employee whose status you want to know. Step 3: Under Roles & Access, find Submit reimbursements.

• Note: This is not configurable.

Submit reimbursement request

Employees can submit reimbursement requests for business expenses that were paid out of pocket by following the steps below.

All reimbursement types

Reimbursements for trips

If you booked a trip using a personal credit card, you can request a reimbursement by following the steps below.

Partial reimbursements

View saved reimbursement draft

You can save reimbursements as a draft to be submitted later. You can find draft reimbursements in the Inbox page and the status of your reimbursement under Expenses > Your requests.

Cancel reimbursement request

You can delete a pending reimbursement request by following the steps below, so long as it hasn’t been approved yet. If the reimbursement has already been approved, domestic employees can arrange a repayment. If you’re an international employee, we recommend reaching out to your account or card admin to address the situation.

In your dashboard

Step 1: Go to Wallet and click on the personal reimbursement request you want to cancel. Account and card admins can see reimbursement requests submitted by their entire team in Expenses. Note: You cannot cancel a pending reimbursement that you didn’t request. Step 2: At the bottom of the details window, click Cancel request. Your account or card admin can also deny your reimbursement request by clicking Deny here, instead.

Copy reimbursement request

You can copy reimbursements that are approved or submitted to generate new reimbursement requests by following the steps below.

Delete reimbursement

Account and card admins can delete denied, failed, or canceled reimbursements so that they no longer appear in their dashboard. Employees can delete their own canceled reimbursements.

Resubmit reimbursement

If a reimbursement is denied or canceled, you can’t edit the details, but you can resubmit it with updated details for a second chance at approval. By resubmitting, you're submitting the request as a new reimbursement that copies over the values from the old reimbursement.

Approve reimbursement request

Account and card admins will see a list of reimbursements needing approval in Inbox > Reimbursements. On your app, these will appear in your Inbox. To approve a reimbursement, click an expense, view details on the right, and click Approve. If the request was still waiting on other reviewers or user documentation, you click Override additional requirements to dismiss those and instantly approve the reimbursement. To request more information from the employee, click Comments to add a comment or Remind about documentation to receive reminders. After an account or card admin approves a reimbursement, employees will be notified by email and can expect to receive the funds based on the payment settings of the entity. For more information on approval chains, read this help article. Note: Once a reimbursement has been approved, it cannot be cancelled.

Rapid approval

Account and card admins can rapidly filter and bulk approves reimbursements from the Expenses page in your Brex dashboard. Here, you’ll find a side panel that lists out all of your company. By clicking Group, you can organize the list based on employee, trip, or other commonalities, so that you can view reimbursement requests in context to one another. Clicking Add Filter narrows down your search by parameters such as how many reimbursements have yet to be paid out, what expenses are pending for a specific subsidiary, or which expenses aren’t compliant. You can use more than one filter at a time. From here, you can bulk approve reimbursements by checking the boxes on the left side of each individual reimbursement or the box above to select all requests in a common group.

You can leave comments on a reimbursement request to ask the employee for more information about the transaction. Add a ‘@’ followed by the user’s name to tag them, or click Remind about documentation to send them an automated reminder.

Automated approval rules

You can configure your policies to auto-approve reimbursements that are under a certain dollar amount.

In your dashboard Premium Enterprise

Step 1: Go to Cards and Limits > Manage policies and click View all. Read this help article for more information on expense polices. Step 2: Select the policy you want to edit and click Edit. Step 3: You can skip the first page by clicking Next. Step 4: Click Edit to modify the approval flow for reimbursements. Step 5: Under Approvers, click Add rule. The default rule lets you choose the minimum dollar amount that requires approval from an account or card admin. For example, if you want reimbursements under $25 to be automatically approved, change For expenses equal to or above to $25.

You can configure secondary approvals for reimbursements by clicking Add another approval step. This adds another approver to pass the approval chain to after the primary approver has signed off.

You can also click Add another rule to make the required approval threshold even more specific. For example, you can configure auto-approval under $25, add single approval for expenses from $25 to $75, and a secondary approval for expenses over $75.

Delivery time

Employees will receive their reimbursement payout 4-8 days after it’s batched. Different types of reimbursements may have different timelines due to cross-border transfer timelines or payment settlement times. If your entity has configured custom payment cycles (i.e., weekly on Fridays), then funding will only occur as per that payment cycle and will still take 4-8 business days to be received by the employee. The estimated time of arrival for a reimbursement can be seen by clicking on the detailed pane of that reimbursement in the dashboard. Note: New accounts and new funding sources may experience longer than normal reimbursement periods due to ACH settlement risk. Please contact Brex Support if this is a prolonged issue.

Track reimbursement payout

After you have submitted your reimbursements, you can track the status of your reimbursement in your Brex dashboard by going to Wallet. To track another employee’s reimbursement, an account or card admin can go to Expenses. Locate the reimbursement you want to track from the list and click on it. In the detail pane, if the reimbursement is already approved and is processing, you will see the estimated time of arrival in the blue box:

The Audit trail helps you understand if the reimbursement is still pending approvals so you can reach out to your company admin to get more insights on the approval. Under Payment status, you will see if the reimbursement has been initiated to your bank account:

• Not Paid: Not yet initiated from the company
• Paid: The reimbursement should have arrived in your bank account

If the reimbursement has been paid, check your bank account for a transaction from your company’s name. The amount may be higher than your individual reimbursement amount since it will be batched with any other reimbursements that have been paid at the same time. This means that one transaction may include the amounts of multiple reimbursements. Check your email for a breakdown of the total amount into the individual reimbursements that have contributed to the batched payment.

Reimbursement accounting

We support reimbursements under our accounting integrations. Reimbursements will be treated on an accrual basis. This means that we will create an open liability from the date the employee reimbursement is approved and close out the liability when the payment to the reimbursement is made. (Not applicable to Xero customers). Remember to configure your Reimbursement Liability account and funding account on your integration settings to make sure the accounting is done correctly for reimbursements. More information on syncing your reimbursements can be found in this help article. Each entity can configure its own reimbursement settings and set global entities to be accounted for in local currency by following the steps here.

Reimbursement statements

Account admins, card admins, or bookkeepers can download statements from the Brex dashboard by following the steps in this help article.

Global reimbursements

Read more about Brex’s comprehensive global capabilities in this help article.

Locally funded reimbursements

Premium Enterprise

Read more about Brex’s ability to receive local currency from your local bank accounts to fund reimbursements in this help article.

View reimbursement liability

Brex provides a global view of all your unpaid reimbursements liability across all your subsidiaries for easy global management. As reimbursements are paid out, this total balance will update automatically. You can view your total approved reimbursement balance in your dashboard under Account > Reimbursements.

Troubleshoot

There are multiple reasons why a reimbursement request might fail, but it can usually be attributed to a recipient issue or a funding issue. You can see if a reimbursement has failed by going to either the Expenses page for employee reimbursements, or the Wallet page for personal reimbursements. Filter for Payment status and click Declined/Failed. When you click on the expense, it will let you know why the reimbursement failed. In some cases, we automatically retry the failed reimbursements after the failure reason is identified and addressed. For example, we’ll re-attempt once a recipient user fixes their bank account issues or passes KYC.

Recipient issues

If the personal bank account information is not valid, the employee will need to reconnect their bank account. You can leave a comment in the details pane to help communicate this. After the employee has updated their bank account, we’ll automatically retry any failed reimbursements.

Funding issues

An error message referencing the company bank account may indicate that the bank account used for funding reimbursements doesn’t have enough funds available. If you still want to use this account to fund the reimbursement, you’ll need to increase its balance before retrying. Otherwise, you can choose to use a different bank account that already has the funds available.

After making sure your designated bank account has enough funds to cover the reimbursement, an account or card admin can click Retry payment at the bottom of the detail pane to pay the employee’s reimbursement.