Spend limit templates/types

You can choose between three distinct spend limit structures, depending on your spend limit’s purpose:

1. User limits: For a single user, accounting for their individual spend toward an overall purpose.
   1. Example: You need a dedicated spend limit for your graphic designer’s recurring software.
2. Group travel: For making business travel arrangements, particularly for more than one individual.
   1. Example: Your leadership team is having an offsite.
3. Vendor: For allocating funds to purchases with a specific vendor.
   1. Example: You want to group all costs dedicated to compensating your manufacturer.

Spend limit templates help your company quickly create spend limits for specific uses that align with company policy. Each template represents a core spend use case — such as business travel, stipends, or procurement — and contains a starter policy and spend limit settings that account and card admins can customize based on company needs. Employees can then request a spend limit from a template that has the correct policies already implemented.

When travelling for business, each employee can request a spend limit for a trip using the individual travel spend limit template. 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
• Time frame of the trip
• Location of the trip
• Amount required for the trip

Once submitted, the new spend limit request will be routed to the employee’s direct manager, then an admin. Alternatively, admins can customize who approves spend limits from a specific template, and automate which parent spend limit the spend limit request is nested under. For example, you could route the spend limit request to the department head, their executive assistant, their direct manager, etc., for approval. Each approved spend limit could then be nested under the larger departmental T&E spend limit for easy tracking and reporting.

Similar to individual travel, the group travel template acts as a template for group business travel, such as for team offsite events.

Stipend templates can be used for employee perks. For example, a remote-first company may offer a work from home stipend with minimal policy rules on that spend. This could be used by employees for any expenses related to remote work.

Procurement templates are designed for vendor payments, such as recurring ads or SaaS subscription fees.

If your desired spend isn’t captured by any of the above categories, the general template can be used as a fallback template

Account and card admins can create a new template in their Brex dashboard by going to Spend limits/Cards and Limits and clicking New template. Choose your desired type of template, name it, and customize its details. You can also duplicate an existing template by going to Spend Limits/Cards and Limits > Manage templates, clicking on an existing template, and choosing Make a copy. From here, you can rename and edit the duplicate template’s details.

Account and card admins can view their spend limit templates in spend limits > Template management. From here, you can sort your templates into the order you want them to appear to your team during the spend limit creation or request process.

Admins can hide a template in their Brex dashboard if you don’t have the need for that particular type of spend within your company. Go to Spend Limits/Cards and Limits > Manage Templates and click on one of the existing templates. In the details pane, click Hide template. That template will no longer be visible for employees to create or request a spend limit from. So long as a template isn’t tied to any active budgets or budget requests, you can delete it from Template management.

You can set your spend limit template to accommodate multiple currencies, which lets you denominate policies in different currencies within the same template. Any non-primary currency is based on the current foreign exchange rate of USD at the time you enable that currency. This setting is template-wide. By default, you’ll have templates enabled for multi-currency policies, but you can specify which currencies you want available by clicking the globe icon on the top right corner.

Account and card admins can set granular rules to determine who within their organization can create or request a spend limit from each template. 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 by listing of individual employees). This enables use cases such as:

• Limiting the ability to request an executive travel spend limit (with less strict airfare/lodging rules) to executives, while other employees can request a spend limit from the stricter travel template.
• Setting stipend spend limits to admin only, which are then automatically provisioned by admins to each employee.
• Limiting the availability of procurement spend limits to the handful of people within your organization who manage vendor contracts.

Next to Expense policy, click Edit. In the new popup window, you can click Edit again next to any of the following to customize the specific expense policy that goes along with your template.

• Category & merchant rules:
  • Set customizations for the category or merchant within the policy
  • Set the policy currency
  • Toggle on or off if spend limits are available to spend for Brex travel
  • Toggle on or off if spend limits are available to spend for bill pay
  • Toggle on or off if expense categories are required
  • Toggle on or off if VAT documentation is required
• Card expenses:
  • Whether or not receipts or memos are required/if there are any exceptions
  • Who will review out-of-policy spend
    • Checkmark whether to add amount-based approval rules
• Reimbursements:
  • Whether or not receipts are required/ if there are any exceptions
  • Who will review out-of-policy spend
    • Checkmark whether to add amount-based approval rules

Note: Policy editing will no longer happen via Settings > Expense policy, only through the spend limit template management page.

Review chains

You can use review chains to set up template-by-template rules for your organization to determine who acts as approvers for requested spend limits. For example, you can route all travel spend limit requests to your travel manager. You can even get more granular by sending only travel spend limit requests that came from your sales team to the travel manager. Want large spend limit requests to be approved by the finance department? You can even add on a rule that your controller needs to approve any spend limit request over $15,000.

And, to save you time, you can also designate automatic approval rules. By choosing Auto approved during your spend limit template 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.

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 template 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 selecting 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.

Advanced spend limit settings allow even greater control and customizability of spend limits by creating defaults for spend limits created from a template, like limit masking or flexibility. These are set as defaults at the template level, but can be changed spend limit-to-spend limit basis by card and account admins and spend limit owners. When an employee requests a spend limit from a template, these settings will automatically apply. When a card/account admins or spend limit owners create a spend limit, these settings will be pre-filled from the template, but editable (either before or after the spend limit is approved). The full list of advanced spend limit settings is as follows:

• Allow limit increase requests
• Hide limit from members
• Allow member expense visibility
• Limit flexibility