How do employee repayments work?

Occasionally, one of your employees may accidentally use their Brex card or request a reimbursement for a personal expense. If this happens, you can use our employee repayments feature to request repayment for their card transaction or (for domestic employees) previously approved reimbursements.

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.

Note: Brex can only facilitate money movement for a repayment in the US. For employees outside of the US, you can use Brex to track the repayment, but must handle money movement outside of the Brex platform, such as a deduction in the employee’s next paycheck.

Enabling repayments

Admins can enable repayments by setting up their reimbursement account under Accounts > Reimbursements > Manage payments 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.

Initiating a repayment (employees)

Step 1: In your dashboard, go to Wallet and click on the transaction you want 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 Brex.

Requesting repayment (managers or admins)

Step 1: In your dashboard, go to Expenses and click on the card transaction or reimbursement 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.

Responding to a repayment request (employees)

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

Step 1: In your dashboard, go to Inbox > Tasks. 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.

Partial repayment of a card expense

Partial repayment is only allowed on card expenses. It isn’t available for reimbursement repayments.

To partially repay a card expense, the expense needs to be itemized to isolate the portion of the expense for repayment. You can click Itemize this expense in the transaction details window to do this.

After itemizing the expense, go to the portion of the expense you want to repay and follow the steps listed above.
reimbursement
Itemization will only be possible if the following conditions are true:

• You are an account admin/card admin/bookkeeper, owner of the expense, or manager of the expense owner

• Repayment hasn’t been requested yet

• The transaction has cleared/posted and isn’t pending

• There isn’t a merchant dispute in progress

• The expense isn’t already itemized

• The expense hasn’t already been exported to your company’s ERP or is preparing to export

Mark as paid

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

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

• The billing currency for the expense isn’t in USD

In these situations, you can click Mark as paid to track repayments and sync them with your ERP while handling the monetary element outside of Brex through your payroll process.

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 or Wallet 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. Then click Repay.