Expense categories

Overview

Whenever you or your teammates use your Brex card, the transaction will generate a card expense on your Brex account. To add clarity to these expenses, they’ll be assigned a merchant category — one of 48 different business categorizations reflective of the vendor’s industry. For example, if you use your card to buy dinner, it’s likely to receive the Restaurant categorization. When creating an expense policy, you can specify how the spend limit will treat different merchant categories—such as requiring further review from any expense with a specific category. However, our default merchant categorizations might not always work for your team. It may make more sense to have your team members base their expenses on expense categories instead of Brex’s standard merchant categories. An expense category is a customizable classification tool that you can use to help catalog your team’s expenses in a more detailed way. You can request that your account representative enables expense categories for you—after which you’ll have roughly 80 expense categories by default. Once enabled, you can mandate that expenses be assigned a category by going to the expense policy and toggling on Require employees to set expense category. This will require your employees to choose an expense category for all expenses within spend limits tied to that policy in order to maintain compliance. You can also update your expense policy to indicate how purchases in a specific expense category should be reviewed. For example, you can allow all expenses below $50 within a specific expense category but require a review for any exceeding $50. Expense categories support collecting category-specific addendum data to provide more expense details that may be required to comply with certain regulatory requirements.

Customizing expense categories

You can customize expense categories to better align with your business operations.

Add expense categories and addendums

You can add custom expense categories by uploading a CSV template with the desired changes. Step 1: Go to Accounting > Fields & mappings > Expense category and open that field’s details window.

Step 2: Click Add from CSV to download the template for adding new expense categories and addendums. Step 3: Follow the instructions included in the template to format your CSV appropriately for upload.

Step 4: Review your uploaded changes prior to finalizing your import. Click Confirm to import.

Edit and delete expense categories

To edit or delete an expense category, follow the steps below: Step 1: In the Expense category details pane, find the value you want to edit. Step 2: Click the three dots next to the value and select either Edit or Delete.

Edit expense category addendums

To edit an expense category addendum, delete the existing expense category, which will remove its associated addendums. Afterward, recreate the expense category by following the steps above, including the updated addendums.