# Request types Get answers to all of your questions regarding Brex **URL Source:** https://www.brex.com/support/request-types --- ## Overview Request types allow you to set rules that govern how employees request certain types of spend. These help your company quickly manage request workflows for creating spend for specific uses that align with your company's policy. Each request type represents a core spend use case that you want employees to request—such as business travel, stipends, or procurement—and is associated with a policy that account and card admins can customize based on company needs. Employees can then request a spend from a request type that has the correct policy rules already implemented. ## Default request types We currently support four default request types that will be listed when you first set up your account: 1. Individual Travel 2. Group Travel 3. Procurement 4. General #### Individual travel When traveling for business, each employee can request a spend for a trip using the individual travel spend request types. The employee only needs to enter essential details, similar to a typical request to a manager done via Slack, Microsoft Teams, or verbally: - Purpose of the trip - Travel dates - Destination - Amount required for the trip Once submitted, the new spend request will be routed based on the customizable approval chain. For example, you could route the spend request to the department head, their executive assistant, their direct manager, etc., for approval. Each approved spend could then be nested under the larger departmental T&E spend for easy tracking and reporting. #### Group travel Similar to individual travel, the group travel request types can be used for group business travel, such as for team offsite events. #### Procurement Procurement request types are designed for vendor payments, such as recurring ads or SaaS subscription fees. #### General If your desired spend isn’t captured by any of the above categories, the general request types can be used as fallback request types. ## Manage request types #### Add request type To create your company’s request types account and card admins can follow the steps below. **Step 1:** In your dashboard, click _Cards and Limits_ > _Manage request type_. **Step 2: **Select _Create new request type _and provide request type details: - _Request type name_ - _Explain to your team when they should use this request_ - _Who can make this request?_ - This sets granular rules to determine who within your organization can create or request a spend for each request type. Settings include everyone (the default setting), admins only, or a custom set of employees (which can be defined by department, cost center, entity, location, or listing of individual employees). - This enables use cases such as: - Executives can only request an executive travel spend (with less strict airfare/lodging rules), while other employees can request a spend from the stricter travel request types. - The availability of procurement spend is limited to the handful of people within your organization who manage vendor contracts. - _Policy Rules: _Your default policy section will always apply. - _Choose additional rules to apply (optional)_ - _Which questions do you want to ask users?_ - Choose from: Individual Travel, Group Travel, Procurement, and General. These influence what information your employees have to fill out when they make a spend request. - Additional controls: These controls allow even greater customizability of spend limits by creating defaults for spend limits created from request types. When an employee requests a spend limit from a request type, these settings will automatically apply. When a card/account admin or spend limit managers create a spend limit, these settings will be pre-filled from the request types, but editable (either before or after the spend limit is approved) - _Hide limit from users _ - _ Allow limit increase requests _ - _ Allow user expense visibility _ - _How much can they exceed this limit?_ **Step 3: **Click _Continue > Save _to update. #### Edit request type To edit a request type, account, and card admins can follow the steps below. **Step 1:** In your dashboard, click _Cards and Limits_ > _Manage request type_. **Step 2: **Select the three dots beside the request type you wish to manage and click _Edit request type_. **Step 3: **Customize the fields as you wish and click _Continue > Save _to update. From this panel, you can drag request types to reorder how they will appear to users, or _Set to inactive_. #### Approve request type Admins can approve employee request types and set how funds are issued in their Brex dashboard. **Step 1:** In your dashboard, click _Tasks > Requests > Limits_ **Step 2: **Review the request details. Click _Approve._ **Step 3: **Select _How are funds issued?_ - Spend limit (default) - Purchase card  - Purchase order **Step 4: **Click _Issue spend limit/p-card/PO._ #### Inactivate request type Admins can hide request types in their Brex dashboard if they don’t have the need for that particular type of spend within their company. **Step 1:** In your dashboard, click _Cards and Limits_ > _Manage request type_. **Step 2: **Select the three dots beside the request type you wish to manage and click _Set to inactive_. Those request types will no longer be visible for employees to create or request a spend from. So long as a request type isn’t tied to any active spend limit or spend requests, you can delete it from the request types template management. ## Customize request type #### Multiple currency You can set your spend request types to accommodate multiple currencies, which lets you denominate request types (and associated approval rules) in different currencies within the same request types. Any non-primary currency is based on the current foreign exchange rate of USD at the time you enable that currency. This setting is request types-wide. By default, you’ll have request types enabled for multi-currency policies, but you can specify which currencies you want available via settings (_Settings_ > _Expenses_ > _Manage currencies_). #### Policy Next to _Policy Rules, _click _View policy _or _Edit policy _to customize the policy rules that goes along with your request types. Read this [article](https://www.brex.com/policy-rule-builder) to learn more. ## Spend request Employees can request a spend from any active request types. To do this, click _Request spend_ and choose from your company’s active request type. You’ll then get a detailed form tailored to that specific request. #### Review chains You can use review chains to set up request types-by-request types rules for your organization to determine who acts as approvers for requested spend. For example, you can route all travel spend requests to your travel manager. You can even get more granular by sending only travel spend requests that came from your sales team to the travel manager. Want large spend requests to be approved by the finance department? You can even add on a rule that your controller needs to approve any spend request over $15,000. To save you time, you can also designate automatic approval rules. By choosing _Auto approved_ during your request type setup, you can choose the minimum amount that you want to come to you or your team for approval. Anything that falls below that will automatically be approved. You can create and edit your spend request approval flow by following these steps: **Step 1:** In your dashboard, go to _Cards and limits_ > _Manage request types_. **Step 2: **Click _Create new request type_ or select the request type you want to edit. **Step 3: **Click _Continue_ to get to the _Select approval chain _page. Customize your approval chain **Note: **If this is already set to default, your request will go to your direct manager, then your admin. #### Spend limit for approvals You can set up rules to specify where a spend limit request will be nested depending on the spend limit requestor and the request types being used. This means that an admin no longer has to be an approver on all spend limit requests in order to choose a parent spend limit for that request. Parent spend limit rules help you allocate and unblock spend faster by streamlining the parent spend limit selection process for spend limit requests. For example, if all of an employee’s offsite spend limits are nested under the same parent spend limit, you can automatically assign them to that parent spend limit. Or, if all of the sales team’s travel spend limits are all routed to the same sales T&E parent spend limit, you can create a rule to automatically have that happen. Approval chains for spend limit increase requests will automatically follow the same approval chain as the spend limit. **Note**: Brex card and account admins can disable automatic parent spend limit assignment rules in order to select the parent spend limit on a case-by-case basis.