Expense categories

Whenever you or your teammates use your Brex card, the transaction will generate a card expense on your Brex account. To add clarity to these expenses, they’ll be assigned a merchant category — one of 48 different business categorizations reflective of the vendor’s industry. For example, if you use your card to buy dinner, it’s likely to receive the Restaurant categorization. When creating a expense policy, you can specify how the spend limit will treat different merchant categories—such as requiring further review from any expense with a specific category. However, our default merchant categorizations might not always work for your team. It may make more sense to have your team members base their expenses on expense categories instead of Brex’s standard merchant categories. ​​An expense category is a customizable classification tool that you can use to help catalog your team’s expenses in a more detailed way. Unlike merchant categories, expense categories can be hand-picked by your team and managed by your account and card admins, for any given expense. You’ll have roughly 80 expense categories by default upon opening your Brex account, and you can update these to better align with your business operations by reaching out to Brex Support. When confirming your custom expense categories, you can make the assignment of a category mandatory for expenses by going to the Policy section of a template and toggling on Require expense category. This will require your employees to choose an expense category for all expenses within spend limits tied to that template in order to maintain compliance. If you’d like to enable custom expense categories, please reach out to your account representative. Once enabled, you can update your budget templates to indicate how purchases in a specific expense category should be reviewed. For example, you can allow all expenses below $50 within a specific expense category but require a review for any exceeding $50.