How do employee repayments work?

Occasionally, one of your employees may use their Brex card in error for a personal expense. If this occurs, you’ll have the option of using our employee repayments feature to prompt that employee to submit a repayment for their card transactions. Brex does not set your expense policy, so if an employee declines a repayment request or has not repaid a particular expense that you believe should be repaid, that’s a discussion that would not be facilitated by the Brex platform.

Enabling repayments

Admins can enable repayments by setting up their reimbursement account under Profile > Settings > Expenses > Company Reimbursement Account in your dashboard.

You can choose to use either your Brex business account or an external bank account. If using an external bank, it’ll need to be a US-based bank account you’ve already linked to your Brex account.

Request an employee repayment

Step 1: In your dashboard, go to Expenses> All expenses and click on the card transaction you’d like to request a repayment for.

Step 2: In the transaction details window, click Request repayment.

Step 3: Provide a reason for the request and click Send request.

Your employee has now been sent a request to repay the expense. If at any point you’d like to remove the request, open the transaction and click Cancel payment request.

Repay a repayment request

Note: If you received an email prompt to repay a transaction, you can skip the first step by clicking View expense from the email.

Step 1: In your dashboard, go to Expenses. Find and click on the transaction in the repayment requests section at the top of the page.

Step 2: In the transaction details window, click Repay.

Step 3: If you haven’t already done so, connect a bank account where the payment will draw from.

Step 4: Click Submit repayment.

Repay an expense you made

Step 1: In your dashboard, go to Expenses > All expenses. Find and click on the transaction that you’d like to repay.

Step 2: Click Repay in the transaction details window.

Step 3: If you haven’t already done so, connect a bank account where the payment will draw from.

Step 4: Click Submit repayment.

Note: Requests for repayments can be tracked through the dashboard for employees with both US-based and internationally-based bank accounts. Employees with internationally-based bank accounts will need to pay requests back outside of the Brex portal.

Partially repaying an expense

Step 1: In your dashboard, go to Expenses > All expenses. Find and click the transaction that you’d like to repay.

Step 2: Click the Itemize this expense button in the transaction details window and split the expense into the portion you would like to repay or request a repayment for.

Step 3: Click Itemize [number of expenses split to] expenses.

Step 4: Click on the itemized expense with the portion you would like to request repayment for or repay and follow the steps above.

Mark as paid

Employee repayments where the actual money repayment is processed through Brex aren’t supported for the following situations:

• Card expenses where the purchase currency is non-USD

• The employee is using a non-US bank account to repay

In these situations, the “mark as paid” functionality is still available. It will allow you to track repayments and book them to your ERPs.

Step 1: Follow the same steps to request an employee repayment.

Step 2: Once the repayment has been handled, in your dashboard, go to Expenses > All expenses and click on the transaction you requested a repayment for.

Step 3: In the transaction details window, click Mark as paid.

Retrying failed repayments

Your repayment could fail to complete for a number of reasons. For example, if you’re trying to use an invalid account or routing number, or if your personal bank account has restrictions in place.

Details on why a repayment failed can be found in your Brex dashboard. Once you’ve addressed the problem to ensure successful repayments in the future, follow these steps to retry any past failed repayments.

Step 1: Go to Expenses and click on the failed repayment to view its details. This is where you’ll find the failure reason, as well as possible suggestions to fix it.

Step 2: Click the Retry payment button at the bottom of the detail pane to resubmit the repayment.

Step 3: In the popup menu, confirm that the correct bank account is selected and its details are correct. Once everything is good to go, click Repay.