6. Spend limits, request types, and expense policies
Spend limits
A spend limit is designed to provision any type of company spend, including travel, procurement, and stipends. Spend limits can be spent via physical card, virtual card, reimbursement, or bill payment.
You can allow employees to request a spend limit. If the request is approved, the employee can spend using any method available to them. Your employees can have multiple spend limits assigned to them for all necessary types of spend.
When creating a spend limit, account or card admins must select a policy to control spend for that particular spend limit. Before making a purchase, employees can view the limit’s policy rules, which are automatically enforced for transactions on that limit.
There are two main options for provisioning spend limits:
1. Total: this gives team members access to a larger spend limit with no cut-off of individual spend (e.g: offsites/travel).
2. Per user: this gives individuals a set amount of funds on a one-time or recurring basis (weekly, monthly, yearly) that they are able to spend on their card.
Spend limit requests
Users might request a spend limit if they need additional spend allocated to them to address their specific needs. Account and card admins can set granular rules to determine who within their organization can create or request a spend limit from 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 by listing of individual employees).
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.
Note: these requests and approval flows differ from transaction approval flows!
Individual spend limits
Just like setting credit limits on other cards, with Brex, you issue a user a "Spend Limit." They will then be able to spend on physical or virtual Brex cards from their Wallet page.
Brex does let you assign multiple spend limits to a single team member or group. Employees can switch between spend limits for different expenses from their Wallet on the Brex mobile app or dashboard. This makes it easy to track spend across different purposes and vendors.
To get started, we recommend provisioning a single spend limit to your core team members.
Issue a spend limit
In the same Invite a user flow, you will then be prompted to set a user limit. You can also issue a spend limit at any time by going to Cards & Limits > Create Spend Limit.
When setting up the user limit, you’ll have the option to determine whether the limit is flexible, allowing employees to exceed their assigned spend amount.
Over-limit expenses require approval from the admin or designated approver.
Selecting "No Hard Limit" ensures purchases are never declined for surpassing the spend limit.
Additionally, you can specify recurrence and start/end dates for the limit, although these are optional.
For more details on issuing spend limits, view this Help Center article.
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 that Bills. Additionally, policy rules tied to each request type are designed to meet reporting requirements and best practices.
Creat/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
An expense policy is a set of guidelines and rules established by a company to manage and control employee spending. It helps ensure that expenses are legitimate, reasonable, and compliant with company policies. Every request type and spend limit will have an expense policy attached.
Here are some examples of how you can customize your policy:
Write this policy in a non-USD currency.
Requiring reviews/documentation for specific merchants or categories.
Require employees to set expense category.
Require VAT documentation.
Setting smart merchant and category blocks on Brex cards.
Define automated audit rules to flag high-risk items on itemized receipts, such as those that contain alcohol, cigarettes, gift cards, flight upgrades, lottery tickets, or political spend.Setting role-based dynamic policy exceptions for receipts, memos, and merchant or category rules.
Selecting Add rule for certain users allows you to customize exceptions based on employee attributes, including role, department, and cost center or specific employees.
All expense policies are editable and can be adjusted based on a company’s needs, this can be done through duplicating an existing expense policy or creating a new one altogether.
All expense policies are editable and can be adjusted based on a company’s needs, this can be done through duplicating an existing expense policy or creating a new one altogether.
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.