What are budget templates?

Budget templates help your company quickly create budgets 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 budget settings that admins can customize based on company needs. Employees can then request a budget from a template that has the correct policies already implemented.

Note: Budget templates are only available to accounts that signed up for Brex after March 23. If you created your account earlier, but would like access to budget templates, please reach out to Brex Support.

Default templates

We currently support five budget templates:

Individual travel

When traveling for business, each employee can request a budget for a trip using the individual travel budget 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

• Timeframe of the trip

• Location of the trip

• Amount required for the trip

Once submitted, the new budget request will be routed to the employee’s direct manager, then an admin. In the future, we’ll be adding functionality to customize who approves budgets from a specific template, as well as the ability to automate which parent budget that each budget request is nested under. For example, you could route the budget request to the department head, their executive assistant, their direct manager, etc., for approval. Each approved budget could then be nested under the larger departmental T&E budget for easy tracking and reporting.

Group travel

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

Stipend

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

Procurement templates 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 template can be used as a fallback template.

Manage templates

Admins can make adjustments to templates by going to Budgets > Templates in your dashboard and clicking on the template you want to manage. In the details pane, click Edit or Change beside any of the applicable sections that you’d like to update. Here are some examples:

Multiple currency

To enable spend in multiple currencies, you can duplicate a template and change the currency denomination via the policy. Each template can only be denominated in one currency.

Expense policy

Next to Expense policy, click Edit. In the new popup window, you can click Edit again next to Card expenses, Reimbursements, or Category & merchant rules. This allows you to customize the specific expense policy that goes along with your template.

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

Create templates

Admins can create a new template in their Brex dashboard by duplicating an existing template and editing it as needed. Go to Budgets > Templates and click on one of the existing templates. In the details pane, choose Make a copy. You’ll then be asked to name the template and be able to change the associated policy.

Hide templates

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 Budgets > 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 budget from.

Requesting budgets from a budget template

Employees can request a budget from any active template. To do this, click Request Budget and choose from your company’s active budget templates. You’ll then get a detailed form tailored to that specific request or template.