Budgets overview
This article refers to a feature that might not be available in your current Brex plan. If you'd like to learn more about this feature and how to unlock additional capabilities in Brex's upgraded plans, please have your account or card admin reach out to Brex Support by clicking on Support in your dashboard.
Overview
Premium Enterprise Budgets are a tool used to track, group, and organize spend across your organization. They provide a clear and organized view of your financial operations. Account admins and card admins have the ability to create budgets. Once a budget is created, admin or budget owners can then create sub-budgets under the budgets they own. For example, an admin may choose to create a budget named ‘EPD’ and then further break down EPD by creating a sub-budget named 'Product' and another sub-budget named 'Engineering.' Budgets cannot be “assigned” to Brex cards. Spend limits, however, are tied to individual cards and are what employees will spend directly from. Spend limits can also be tied to reimbursements and bill payments. If an employee is a budget owner, they can view all budgets they manage, create sub-budgets under budgets they own, and have limited permissions to edit members. Budget owners can only manage the budget's expense visibility and amount if they also own the budget’s parent budget. They will automatically have owner permissions on all nested spend limits.
Budget values
You can track your budget based on values that are calculated by the amount you’ve spent, the amount you’ve allocated, and your total budget amount.
Spent
The amount of your budget that you’ve spent is the expense total from the current budget’s time period.
Spent amount can fluctuate depending on your budget’s recurrence. If your budget is annual, you’ll see all expenses in that period. If you have any quarterly sub-budgets nested underneath an annual budget, you’ll only see expenses in that quarter.
Allocation
Your budget allocation is the total aggregate amount distributed from spend limits. Allocation increases the more you provision spend limits, including spend limit requests. A spend limit must start in the budget’s period. If your spend limit recurs more often than the budget, we’ll aggregate the total spend possible in the budget period.
For example, if John Doe has a $100 monthly stipend spend limit nested under a quarterly budget, the total allocated for this quarterly budget will be $300 (3 months x $100).
Allocation decreases as you archive or close spend limits, or if the spend limit’s recurrence has passed.
For example, if John Doe has a $100 monthly stipend spend limit that he did not use in January, we won’t include January’s spend limit in the current allocation as of February 1. If John Doe only used $10 of this benefit in January, the budget’s spent amount will increase by $10 in February, but we won’t include January's remaining spend limit ($90) in the allocation.
For a detailed view of how a budget is allocated, click View allocation breakdown on the budget you’re interested in.
Budget amount
Your budget amount is the total amount you plan to spend in a given period. Budget amounts won’t fluctuate unless an account admin, card admin, or budget owner edits this value.