Request types

Overview

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 that you want employees to request—such as business travel, stipends, or procurement—and is associated with 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.

Default request types

We currently support four default request types that will be listed when you first set up your account:

1. Individual Travel
2. Group Travel
3. Procurement
4. General

Individual travel

When traveling for business, each employee can request a spend limit for a trip using the individual travel spend limit request types. The employee only needs to enter essential details, similar to a typical request to a manager done via Slack, Microsoft Teams, or verbally:

• Purpose of the trip
• Time frame of the trip
• Location of the trip
• Amount required for the trip

Once submitted, the new spend limit request will be routed based on the customizable approval chain. For example, you could route the spend limit request to the department head, their executive assistant, their direct manager, etc., for approval. Each approved spend limit could then be nested under the larger departmental T&E spend limit for easy tracking and reporting.

Group travel

Similar to individual travel, the group travel request types can be used for group business travel, such as for team offsite events.

Procurement

Procurement request types are designed for vendor payments, such as recurring ads or SaaS subscription fees.

General

If your desired spend isn’t captured by any of the above categories, the general request types can be used as fallback request types.

Manage request types

Add 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?
  • This sets granular rules to determine who within your organization can create or request a spend limit for 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 listing of individual employees).
  • This enables use cases such as:
    • The ability to request an executive travel spend limit (with less strict airfare/lodging rules) is limited to executives, while other employees can request a spend limit from the stricter travel request types.
    • The availability of procurement spend limits is limited to the handful of people within your organization who manage vendor contracts.
• Which policy should apply?
• Which questions do you want to ask users?
  • Choose from: Individual Travel, Group Travel, Procurement, and General. These influence what information your employees have to fill out when they make a spend limit request.
• Additional controls: These controls allow even greater customizability of spend limits by creating defaults for spend limits created from request types. When an employee requests a spend limit from a request type, 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)
  • PremiumEnterpriseSmart card Hide limit from users
  • PremiumEnterpriseSmart card Allow limit increase requests
  • PremiumEnterpriseSmart card Allow user expense visibility
  • Limit flexibility

Step 3: Click Continue > Save to update.

Edit request type

To edit a request type, account and card admins can follow the steps below. Step 1: In your dashboard, click Cards and Limits > Manage request type. Step 2: Select the three dots beside the request type you wish to manage and click Edit request type. Step 3: Customize the fields as you wish and click Continue > Save to update. From this panel, you can drag request types to reorder how they will appear to users or Set to inactive.

Inactivate request type

Admins can hide request types in their Brex dashboard if you don’t have the need for that particular type of spend within your company. Step 1: In your dashboard, click Cards and Limits > Manage request type. Step 2: Select the three dots beside the request type you wish to manage and click Set to inactive. That request types will no longer be visible for employees to create or request a spend limit from. So long as a request type isn’t tied to any active spend limit or spend limit requests, you can delete it from request typesTemplate management.

Customize request type

Multiple currency

You can set your spend limit request typesto accommodate multiple currencies, which lets you denominate request types (and associated approval rules) in different currencies within the same request types. Any non-primary currency is based on the current foreign exchange rate of USD at the time you enable that currency. This setting is request types-wide. By default, you’ll have request types enabled for multi-currency policies, but you can specify which currencies you want available via settings (Settings > Expenses > Manage currencies).

Expense policy

Next to Expense policy, click View policy. In the new popup window, you can click Edit policy to customize the specific expense policy that goes along with your request types. Read this article to learn more.

Spend limit request

Employees can request a spend limit from any active request types. To do this, click Request spend limit and choose from your company’s active spend limit request type. You’ll then get a detailed form tailored to that specific request.

Review chains

You can use review chains to set up request types-by-request types rules for your organization to determine who acts as approvers for requested spend limits. For example, you can route all travel spend limit requests to your travel manager. You can even get more granular by sending only travel spend limit requests that came from your sales team to the travel manager. Want large spend limit requests to be approved by the finance department? You can even add on a rule that your controller needs to approve any spend limit request over $15,000. And, to save you time, you can also designate automatic approval rules. By choosing Auto approved during your spend limit request types 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. You can create and edit your spend limit request approval flow by following these steps: Step 1: In your dashboard, go to Cards and limits > Manage request types. Step 2: Click Create new request type or select the request type you want to edit. Step 3: Click Continue to get to the Select approval chain page. Customize your approval chain Note: If this is already set to default, your request will go to your direct manager, then your admin.

Spend limit for approvals

You can set up rules to specify where a spend limit request will be nested depending on the spend limit requestor and the request types being used. This means that an admin no longer has to be an approver on all spend limit requests in order to choose a parent spend limit for that request. Parent spend limit rules help you allocate and unblock spend faster by streamlining the parent spend limit selecting process for spend limit requests. For example, if all of an employee’s offsite spend limits are nested under the same parent spend limit, you can automatically assign them to that parent spend limit. Or, if all of the sales team’s travel spend limits are all routed to the same sales T&E parent spend limit, you can create a rule to automatically have that happen. Approval chains for spend limit increase requests will automatically follow the same approval chain as the spend limit. Note: Brex card and account admins can disable automatic parent spend limit assignment rules in order to select the parent spend limit on a case-by-case basis.