8. Request types and expense policy
Request types
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 limits for specific uses that align with company policy. Each request type represents a core spend use case — such as business travel, stipends, or procurement — and is associated with a 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 request type that has the correct policies already implemented.
Within your Brex dashboard there are five types of default form selections :
1. Individual travel
2. Group travel
3. Procurement
4. General
These questions were created with the goal of addressing common business use cases and spend patterns. For example Group Travel is often used for company or team offsites and the Procurement form can set a specific review chain. Additionally, policy rules tied to each request type are designed to meet reporting requirements and best practices.
Create/edit your 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:
What do you want to call this request?
Explain to your team when they should use this request.
Who can make this request?
Which policy should apply?
Which questions do you want to ask users?
Additional controls: These controls allow even greater customizability of spend limits by creating defaults for spend limits created from request types, like hiding limits or flexibility. These are set as defaults at the request types level, but can be changed spend limit-to-spend limit basis by card and account admins and spend limit managers. When an employee requests a spend limit from a request types, these settings will automatically apply. When a card/account admins 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
- Limit flexibility
Step 3: Click Continue > Save to update.
Expense policy
Managing employee spending becomes simpler with Brex by establishing expense policies. Once your policy is in place, you'll save time with automatic reminders for employees to add memos or receipts when required. You will also be able to focus your efforts on reviewing only out-of-policy transactions.
To edit your company’s default policy, follow the steps below.
Step 1: In your dashboard, click Cards and Limits > Manage policies.
Step 2: Select Create new policy or select the policy you wish to manage and click Edit. There you can determine if you want to require receipts or memos for every transaction or just those above a certain threshold.
Step 3: You can also set up approval flows that will automatically notify selected individuals when spend is out of policy. For instance, a direct manager, any admin, or a specific user. You can also set up multiple-level approvals and limit these to expenses above a certain dollar value.
Tip: You can add similar approval flows and restrictions to bill pay, card expenses, and reimbursements.
Create/edit your policy
Managing employee spending becomes simpler with Brex by establishing a company-wide expense policy. Once your policy is in place, you'll save time with automatic reminders for employees to add memos or receipts when required. You will also be able to focus your efforts on reviewing only out-of-policy transactions.
To edit your company’s policy, follow the steps below.
Step 1: In your dashboard, click Cards and Limits and navigate to Manage policies.
Step 2: Select Create new policy or select the policy you wish to manage and click Edit.
Step 3: Customize your policy by indicating the policy currency.
All policies have a specific base currency in which the policy rules are written in. These policy rules are then translated into all other enabled currencies.
Enabled currencies are set policy-wide. They dictate how we translate currency policy rules and what currency your employees can choose from when they request spend limits.
Users who create or request a spend limit will now choose the currency in which that spend limit and Policy will be denominated in, from the list of enabled currencies.
Step 4: Indicate which transactions need receipts and memos based on the category and merchant.
You can also set up approval flows that will automatically notify selected individuals when spend is out of policy. For instance, a direct manager, any admin, or a specific user. You can also set up multiple-level approvals and limit these to expenses above a certain dollar value.
Step 5: Click Update & review then Save.
To set up auto-generated receipts, navigate to either Expenses or Wallet in your dashboard, then select the expense. Under spend limit & policy, select the arrow on the right side. This will reveal the spend limit, Receipt, and Memo fields for card transactions.
To set a reimbursement approval chain (including memo and receipt rules), you can do so through each policy.