Meal expenses

Overview

From time to time, you might use your Brex card to cover a meal expense that includes other employees in attendance. To help provide context to the expense, we have a List attendees feature that, when set up, will prompt the spender to submit additional information for transactions in the Meals category. Account or card admins can set up the list attendees policy in their dashboard. You’ll have the option to choose a threshold amount that is either evaluated by the total amount for each expense or on a per-diem basis. You can also require detailed information about external attendees for each meal, if applicable. Brex AI uses your calendar information to automatically add internal and external attendees (if required by policy). If the attendee isn’t added automatically, you’ll be prompted to add them manually by filling out a few extra details. Once this rule is triggered, employees will be asked to add attendees for the expense. This is done in either window that opens when clicking on the expense or through a reimbursement form prompt. Adding attendees to a meal expense will not, however, trigger an amount based approval rule if the individual per-person amount is below the approval amount. Note: You don’t need the rule to be triggered to add attendees. You can do this at any point. You can narrow down which employees can attend a meal by checking one or more of the options under Meals. They are as follows:

• Flag attendees who belong to the submitter's management chain: This checks the list of internal attendees against the submitter's management chain and highlights anyone who’s a part of it.
  • This check doesn’t update if the management chain changes later on.
• Flag government officials: This checks the listed attendees against publicly available information to determine if anyone is listed as a government official.
• Require company/organization name for external attendees
• Require job title for external attendees

Once this rule is triggered, employees will be asked to add attendees for the expense. This is done in either window that opens when clicking on the expense or through a reimbursement form prompt. Note: You don’t need the rule to be triggered to add attendees. You can do this at any point.

Following this, expenses will be flagged for review. You can specifically sort for expenses that are missing attendees.

Setting up attendees

You can create a list of meal expense attendees by following these steps: Step 1: In your dashboard, go to Cards and limits > Manage policies. Step 2: Choose the policy you want the expense to fall under and click Edit policy. Step 3: Under Flag or block expenses matching, click Meals. Step 4: Click the pencil icon, toggle on Require list of attendees, and click Save.

Adding attendees

You can add attendees to an expense by following the steps below, depending on whether the attendee is another user on your Brex account or an external party.

Internal attendees

An internal attendee is anyone who already has a Brex account under your company. Step 1: In your dashboard, go to Expenses and click the expense you want to add attendees to. Step 2: In the details window, go to Attendees and click Search attendees. Step 3: In the search bar, enter the name or email of the coworkers you want to add and click on the results.

External attendees

An external attendee is someone that you want to add to the expense who does not have a Brex user account for your company. Step 1: In your dashboard, go to Expenses and click the expense you want to add attendees to. Step 2: In the details window, go to External attendees and click Manage external attendees. Step 3: Add the name, title, company or organization details, and government employee. Click Save all.