Expense policies

Overview

An expense policy is a set of guidelines and rules established by a company to manage and control employee spending. It helps ensure that expenses are legitimate, reasonable, and compliant with company policies. Account and card admins can create and manage expense policies in the Brex dashboard. The policy can be customized to indicate which transactions need receipts and memos, set deadlines for submission, and send automatic follow-up reminders. Expense policies also allow admins to review out-of-policy transactions and send reminders to employees who need to take action.

Expense policy setup and management

For Premium, Enterprise, and P-card Premium Enterprise P-card

To create and manage your company’s expense policy, follow the steps below. Step 1: In your dashboard, click Cards and Limits > Manage templates. Step 2: Select the template you wish to manage and click Edit.

Step 3: Customize your policy by indicating the policy currency and which transactions need receipts and memos based on the category and merchant. Here are some examples of how you can customize your policy:

• Creating travel and expense rules, such as creating parameters for spend on meals.
• Requiring reviews/documentation for specific merchants or categories
• PremiumEnterprise Setting smart merchant and category blocks on Brex cards
• PremiumEnterprise Define automated audit rules to flag high-risk items on itemized receipts, such as those that contain alcohol, cigarettes, gift cards, flight upgrades, lottery tickets, or political spend.
• Setting dynamic policies based on employee attributes, including role, department, and cost center or specific employees that qualify for the exception.

Step 4: Click Next. Step 5: Review your expense policy before sharing them with your company. As soon as you update a policy’s rules, in-flight and future expenses will start referencing the new rules.

Expense review

Account and card admins can review expenses that fall outside their company’s policy from the Brex dashboard. We’ll send weekly reminders to account admins, card admins, and managers to review expenses for their direct reports. All employee purchases that fall out of your policy will be flagged for review on the Expense review page under Expenses in your dashboard. Use the search bar if you’d like to search for a specific transaction, user, or merchant within expense alerts. You can filter out-of-policy alerts using the dropdown menus by department, user, or issue (missing receipt, memo, etc). To resolve alerts, an account or card admin can click on each transaction individually or use the bulk selection tool by clicking the checkboxes on the left. Select from these actions:

• Mark as reviewed: Approves the transaction.
• Follow up: Sends an email reminder to the cardholder with an optional note. Cardholders can resolve missing receipt alerts by uploading a receipt.
• Mute alert: Makes an exception and excludes the user or merchant from your policy.

If you accidentally approve a transaction, click Archive at the top of the Expense review page, find the transaction, and click Undo review.

Turn off receipt/memo request

Reminders to add a receipt or memo to a transaction will stop being sent once an account or card admin marks the transaction as reviewed.