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 library> Expense category. Step 2: Click Add with 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 expense categories
To edit an expense category, follow the steps below: Step 1: Go to Accounting > Fields library > Expense category details pane, find the value you want to edit. Step 2: Locate the field you want to edit, then click directly on a value under the Value name column to make changes. You can edit the text inline to update the value name.
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.
Edit name an existing expense category
If you edit the name of an existing expense category, all expenses—including exported, non-exported, and historical—will have the updated name.
Delete or disable expense categories
To delete or disable an expense category, follow the steps below: Step 1: Go to Accounting > Fields library > Expense category details pane, and find the value you want to delete. Step 2: Click the three vertical dots beside the value and select either Disable or Delete.
Delete existing expense category
Deleting an existing expense category impact expenses that don’t already use that category, but won’t change the category value for expenses where the deleted category is already selected.
Configure the expense category field
For setting up additional field-related options, like visibility, please refer to our Fields article here for further details.