Getting started with Brex

Welcome to Brex! Congratulations on beginning your company’s spend management journey with us. The following will serve as a guide to help you set up your company account, and help subsequent team members you invite to set up their individual user accounts.

If you, at any point, have questions about one of the steps, please contact your Customer Support Manager or Brex Support.

Note: If you received an invitation to join your teammates on Brex and you want to get started with your individual employee account, please skip to the User setup section of the article.

Company setup

After your company is approved for a Brex account, the first thing you’ll want to do as an admin is set up your account in a way that works best for your company. You’ll be prompted with some of these steps after you’ve signed into your dashboard for the first time.

Step 1: Verify your business

You’ll be asked to provide some additional details about your company, such as business address and incorporation details. All of this information helps us to understand your company better.

Brex Essentials You’ll also be asked to provide company ownership information, which must be completed before moving to the next step.

Brex Plus You can move to the next step and apply for financial services after you complete your initial business verification. If you’re not ready to apply for financial services yet, you can skip to Step 2b and provide your company’s ownership information first.

To select your preferred financial product (the Brex business account and/or the Brex card), follow the prompts that appear on your screen.

Step 2a: Apply for financial services

We use connected bank accounts to help determine your company's credit limit. Your credit limit is the total amount your entire team — across all of your cards and budgets — can spend during a given statement period. To find more information on Brex credit limits, read How do Brex credit limits work?.

Brex Essentials You can connect your bank account using Plaid to give us a real-time look into your financials, or indicate that you want to upload bank statements, instead. If you don’t have the right financial data available, you can tell us more about your financial situation to help make sure we get you the appropriate spending limit.

After adding your initial bank connection, you can connect additional bank accounts from the Settings section of your dashboard. You can also view, remove, or fix current connections from this same place. To learn more details, read How do I manage my bank connections?.

Note: If you want to skip to setting up your Brex business account, you can do so here.

Step 2b: Provide your business/company owner details

Brex Plus If you have yet to verify company ownership, we’ll ask for details on your business owner/account owner. This includes the Social Security number or valid ID of the owner applying for your new Brex account, among other details.

Step 3: Set up budgets

When inviting a new user, make sure to create a budget so that they can start spending. You can always set up more than one budget by following the instructions in How do I create or request a budget?.

Step 4: Invite users and manage organization

Before you start inviting new users to join your Brex account, go to the Team tab to create departments and locations (if applicable). Once created, you can assign users to the appropriate departments and/or locations during the new user invitation process. The process to create, edit, and delete departments can be found in How do I create, edit, and delete departments?. For locations, please read How do I create, edit, and delete locations?.

At this point, you’ll have everything in place to start inviting users, which you can find the instructions for in How do I add and manage the users on my Brex account?. You also may want to read through What are the various Brex role types? to get a sense of which role type is best suited for each of your team members.

Step 5: Manage users

After your invited team members finish setting up their own user accounts, you can start managing how they operate within your Brex account. While many of their permissions will be tied to the role type you originally gave them, you can delegate new duties to them as applicable. This includes setting up account copilots or assigning managers to approve employee spend.

Step 6: Integrate your accounting software

Brex integrates directly with several ERPs to enable automatic reconciliation that may save your finance team many hours per month. You can find a full list of supported ERPs and their individual setup instructions in this help article.

Step 7: Start using Brex rewards

Brex rewards is the most valuable card rewards program on the market as there is no cap on what you can earn with Brex.

If your company uses Brex as its primary corporate card, you'll qualify for Brex Exclusive and earn points on all USD card spend at US merchants. To learn more about the different rewards multipliers by reading What rewards does Brex offer?.

Your points can be redeemed for statement credit, travel benefits, airline miles, cryptocurrency, plus more. All of your options are highlighted in How do I redeem my Brex points?.

You can view your current points balance from the Marketplace in your Brex dashboard.

Step 8: Learn about Brex travel

Brex travel allows you to book trips from your Brex app or dashboard — including flights, accommodations, and rental vehicles. You’ll want to start by establishing your Brex travel account, which is covered in How do I start using Brex travel?. Once you’ve customized your account, you can start booking by reading How do I book a trip with Brex travel?.

Brex business account setup

If you have a new Brex business account alongside your regular Brex account, you’ll want to make sure you set this up, as well.

Step 1: Fund your Brex business account

You have several different options to transfer funds into your Brex business account. You can transfer funds from an external bank account — either by connecting that bank account via your Brex dashboard or by initiating a transfer from your bank’s platform. You can also deposit checks from your Brex app.

You can read more about your different options in How do I add funds to my Brex business account?.

Note: You’ll also want to take processing times into consideration when you’re funding your account. These are expanded upon in What are the standard processing times for transfers?.

Step 2: Invite Brex business account-specific users

Account admins and AP clerks are two role types that are only available if you have a Brex business account. Account admins have a full view of both card and Brex business account transactions. They can set up integrations and invite new AP clerks, and are the only role type that can initiate payments with Brex business accounts.

Bookkeepers act similarly to a read-only user. They are not able to initiate payments, but can still see all transactions on the account and manage any integrations. More details can be found in What are the various Brex role types?.

Step 3: Make your first payment

Once you’ve successfully transferred funds into your account, you can find your current available balance by following the steps in How do I view my Brex business account balances?. As long as you have a positive balance, you can initiate outbound payments. You have four different methods to send outbound payments: ACH, domestic wire, international wire, and check.

Step 4: Connect your payroll and other resources

You can connect your company resources with Brex using your account and routing numbers found by following the steps in How do I find my account and routing number?. For instructions on connecting popular payroll services, please read How do I connect my payroll to my Brex business account?.

User setup

Once your account or card admin has set up your Brex account, you can expect to receive an invitation to create your user profile. Here are the steps you’ll want to follow after that invitation email arrives in your inbox.

Step 1: Accept your invitation

If your team's account, card, or user management admin has created a new user account for you, you'll receive an email with the subject line: “[Action Required] Welcome to Brex! Your corporate card is waiting.” When you open the email, click the Create account button to accept your invitation.

After accepting, you'll be redirected to the Brex dashboard to enter your phone number.

Step 2: Request your physical card

You should also have been given the option to order a physical Brex MasterCard. If you weren't prompted to do so, you can issue yourself a physical card by following How do I request a Brex card?.

Note: You can reference the same article to issue yourself virtual cards.

Your physical card can be shipped anywhere within the United States, and will arrive in 5-7 business days. Once it arrives, you can activate it by referencing How do I activate my card?.

Step 3: Add your card to a budget

To start spending with either your physical or virtual card, select the budget you’d like to spend from by following the instructions in How do I spend on a different budget?.

Any budgets assigned to you will represent how much you can spend for different purposes. If you have more than one budget, you can instantly change which budget is assigned to your card via your dashboard or app, and spend up to that particular budget limit. If you need another budget at any point in the future, please read How do I create or request a budget?.

Step 4: Manage your expenses

Once you start using your Brex card (be it a physical card, a virtual card, or budget card), your transactions will reflect in your history in both the Brex app and dashboard. Your account or card admin may require you to attach receipts and/or memos to your expenses — or, even if they don’t, you might prefer to do this yourself for organization purposes.

Step 5: Manage your direct reports’ expenses

If you’re a manager, account admin, or card admin that’s been designated as the approver for other team members’ transactions, you can monitor any inbound requests from the Inbox page of your dashboard. This includes reviewing expenses, bill payment drafts, and higher budget limit requests.

Step 6: Learn about repayments and reimbursements

Reimbursements (domestic or global) refer to business expenses that you make on a personal card which you can request be paid back. Repayments are personal expenses you make on your Brex card that you subsequently pay your company back for.

To use either product, you’ll want to connect a personal bank account by following the steps in Can I use a personal bank account for reimbursements and repayments?.

Afterward, you can follow the steps in this article to submit a reimbursement: How can I submit a reimbursement request? or in this article to repay an expense How do employee repayments work?.