Managing your expenses
Overview
Each Brex card transaction generates an expense entry within your Brex account, providing you with detailed insights into your spending habits, including the timing, the person responsible, and the vendor details. This helps get your expense ready for export to your ERP so you can close your books faster.
Expense details
After transacting with your Brex card, an entry for the expense will appear in your dashboard and app. This entry will catalog the expense and list out a number of details, such as the amount, vendor, and merchant category. It will also give you the opportunity to upload a receipt or add a memo. Expenses will be posted to your Brex account almost instantly. You can click the gear to adjust the order of the table, its columns, and its display. You can view expense entries by following the steps below.
View a single expense
In your dashboard
Step 1: Account and card admins can view the details of expenses byAll expenses, Not compliant, or Pending my review in the Expenses page. You can view details of personal expenses from the Wallet page. Step 2: Select the expense you’d like to know more about. Step 3: A window will open with additional information. If you’d like more details about a declined expense on your personal card, these are only visible from the Brex mobile app.
In your app
Step 1: Go to your Wallet > Latest expenses. You can also tap All expenses to view older expenses. Step 2: Tap the expense you want to know more about to open a page with additional information.
Filtering expenses
Account or card admins can filter expenses from the Expenses page when looking at other users’ expenses or from the Wallet page to view personal expenses. On either page, use the search bar to either find specific expenses or narrow down expenses based on a certain date range, type, spend limit, expense status, and more.
Grouping expenses
You can group expenses to have them displayed by spend limit, merchant, category, and employee. Grouping works in conjunction with the filtering feature, allowing you to filter through already-grouped expenses. Grouping lets admins view and approve or deny outstanding requests in bulk. To group your expenses, follow the steps below. Step 1: Account and card admins can group expenses made by all team members in the Expenses page. You can also group personal expenses from the Wallet page. Step 2: Click on the Group dropdown at the top of the expenses table. Step 3: Choose whether you want to Group by spend limit, Group by merchant, Group by merchant category, or — for account or card admins — Group by employee. All of the expenses will be sorted into descending groups based on your parameter of choice. For example, if you choose to group by merchant, expenses made with the same merchant will appear together in the list below. Step 4: Once you’ve selected a grouping, click See all in any of the group headers for a detailed view of all expenses in that group. You can click See more in the group header to view more expenses, if there are any more to be displayed. You can perform any of the available actions from All expenses or Wallet, including grouping, filtering, and reviewing.
Expense statuses
Your expense’s Status refers to what stage the payment is at in the processing cycle. Here are some of the different statuses that you might see and what they mean:
Pending expense
A pending expense is a charge that Brex has approved, but the merchant’s system hasn’t yet cleared. It will generally process within two days, but depending on the merchant, it can take up to 30 days. Pending expenses will still be subtracted from your available spend, but won’t be added to your upcoming statement until they’ve fully cleared. For this reason, if the merchant cancels the expense before it clears, no funds will have been deducted from your primary funding account.
Cleared expense
A cleared expense is one which has been approved both by Brex and the merchant. Cleared expenses may have a higher dollar amount than they did when they were pending. This may be due to a final charge that wasn’t captured when the expense entry originally generated. For example, if you leave a tip at a restaurant, the cleared amount will be different than the pending charge of the meal.
Pre-authorized expenses
Some merchants will issue a charge to your card with the intention of dropping it within 30 days. This is often done by merchants, such as hotels, to cover any expenses incurred, and is known as a pre-authorized expense. They can either be reversed by the merchant, expire after the given timeframe, or clear for the final amount.
Managing meal expenses and attendees
Meal costs incurred for meals during business activities are meal expenses, which both you and other attendees can track or manage through expense policies. For more information on how to manage expense policies, read this help article.
Itemizing expenses
To better manage spend, admins and employees can split a single expense into individual line items and attribute each line item to a different spend limit. Before you can itemize an expense, it must be processed and no longer pending. Each spend limit's expense policy and rules will be automatically applied. For example, if your employee travels for work, your company may cover the employee's hotel room, but the employee might choose to upgrade their room. They can split the cost of this expense, separating the base cost of the room and anything extra. The employee can then go on to send a repayment for the extra cost. Once a card expense goes through, you can itemize the expense into different spend limit by following the steps below: Note: Once an expense is itemized it cannot be reversed.
In the dashboard
Step 1: An account or card admin can itemize an expense on behalf of another user in the Expenses page. Employees can itemize personal expenses from the Wallet page. Step 2: Choose the specific expense to itemize and click Itemize this expense under Card transaction details section Step 3: Choose the name of the merchant category and allocate the percentage or amount for each itemized expense. Step 4: Choose the second merchant category and amount. Click Itemize # expenses and then click Confirm on the pop-up. Once this is complete, the expense will be split and itemized into merchant categories. Step 5: After the itemization is complete, you can update the budget, memo, receipt, and other information of the itemized expense as you see fit.
In the app
Step 1: Click on the expense and under the Merchant section, click Itemize this expense. Step 2: Choose the name of the merchant category and allocate the percentage or amount you’d like attributed to each. Step 3: Click Confirm. Step 4: After the itemization is complete, you can update the spend limit, memo, receipt, and other information of the itemized expense as you see fit.
Expense comments
When you or your employee need to ask a question about a transaction, you can use comments within the Brex dashboard or mobile app to do so — without needing to send an email or text on another channel. You’ll be able to carry out back and forth replies until the issue is resolved. If no conversation is required, comments can also be used as a tool to leave more information on a particular transaction that won’t fit in the memo section. This way, everything stays within Brex and can easily be accessed during audits. Expense owners will be notified of any new comment via email, push notification or in-app notifications, if they have them enabled. You can also loop other parties into the conversation by adding an @ symbol, followed by the user’s name. If a user is tagged in a comment, they’ll be notified, and can view the task in their Inbox > Tasks section of the dashboard. The user you’ve tagged can reply to the comment to continue the discussion. If no follow-up is necessary, they can mark the task as complete by clicking Resolve. The comment is resolved automatically whenever the expense task is completed. Admins and managers can use expense comments to remind employees to submit expense documentation prior to the expense being approved. Before typing a custom message in the comment box, click Remind about documentation. This will send an email to the expense owner, reminding them to submit any missing documentation required by their expense policy. Brex Assistant will ask the employee to summarize policy violations and anomalies, though you can fine-tune its behavior in Settings > Brex Assistant. AI commenting provides the most value when you turn on Automatic follow-ups and set Memo requirements to Advanced.
Refunded expenses
If you need to have a card expense refunded, we recommend you reach out to the merchant with this request. Once a merchant has issued you a refund, a credit will show on your account within 30 business days. For all refunded expenses made with your Brex card, your refund will be credited to your Brex card balance. This means that all refunds will be available credit for you to use on any of your Brex cards, and the funds will not be returned to the card you made the expense with. The refund will appear in your Wallet page. Refunds will still be processed even if your card has been locked or canceled. If you have a returned ACH, wire, or check, these funds will be returned to your Brex business account balance.
Cancel an expense
Once you've completed an expense with your Brex card, you won't be able to cancel the expense.
Expense merchant identification
We’ve partnered with MasterCard for a direct source into the card network so that our merchant identification infrastructure provides close to 100% accuracy. However, charges can sometimes appear differently than expected, which can be confusing. This happens for a variety of reasons and is true for all Issuers If you come across a charge on which the merchant was captured incorrectly, please contact Brex Support.