Note: Reimbursements are currently available to select early-access customers who will provide invaluable feedback to our team. If you’re interested, contact your Brex customer success manager or chat with Brex Support from your dashboard.
What are reimbursements?
When employees need to put company expenses on their personal cards, account and card admins can easily reimburse them from the Brex dashboard through our reimbursements feature.
With reimbursements, you can:
Approve a reimbursement in two clicks or less from your Requests tab, under Expenses.
Invite employees to submit reimbursement requests, even if they don't have a Brex card.
Set up managers to approve reimbursements before they come to your finance team.
Instantly reconcile reimbursements through our QuickBooks Online and NetSuite integrations.
Enabling reimbursements
Account and card admins can set up reimbursements for their company by following the steps below.
Step 1: Navigate to Expenses > Requests.
Note: The first time you land on this page after reimbursements are enabled, you can set up an account to pay out reimbursements and add hierarchical approvals.
Step 2: Designate which account you want to use to cover reimbursements.
Choose to either link your Brex business account or your external bank account that has already been linked to your Brex account. If you’re unable to connect your external bank account through your dashboard, you won’t be able to use it for reimbursements.
Note: This needs to be a US-based bank account.
To verify a new external bank account, click Manage settings on the Requests page.
Step 3: Set up hierarchical approvals.
You can now elect for managers to approve reimbursements before they go to the final approver. You can do this for card requests, user limit requests, and reimbursements.
If you don’t set a manager for approval, the request will go straight to your admin.
Step 4: Invite employees who will only have access to reimbursements using the Teams page. Indicate that they’re an employee, but toggle Allow corporate cards off.
Step 5: Set up reimbursements for your integration using the instructions in How do I set up reimbursement syncing for my integration?.
Approving reimbursements (Admins)
Account or card admins will see a list of reimbursements needing approval under Expenses > Company requests.
To approve a reimbursement, click a request, view details on the right, and click Approve.
After a reimbursement is approved by an account admin, employees will be notified by email and can expect to receive the funds via ACH within 2-3 business days when using your Brex business account.
Helpful links
Brex Empower™ supports comprehensive reimbursement capabilities for your entire global team. If employees happen to spend on their personal cards, account and card admins can still continue to leverage the comprehensive approval, compliance, policy, automation, and accounting capabilities in Brex’s spend platform.
With reimbursements, you can:
Invite employees to submit reimbursement requests, even if they don't have a Brex card.
Ensure all submitted reimbursements are to policy and have necessary compliance information.
Approve a reimbursement in two clicks or less from your Expenses tab.
Set up managers to approve reimbursements before they come to your finance team.
Set up payment settings per entity, with custom funding sources, payment cycles, and accounting.
Instantly reconcile reimbursements through our comprehensive accounting integrations.
Enabling reimbursements
Account and card admins can set up reimbursements for their company by following the steps below.
Note: Please first allowlist the ACH ID 9121145349.
For your main account (parent entity)
Step 1: You can activate the reimbursement product by going to Accounts and clicking on Reimbursement Setup. This takes you through our step-by-step guide to set up funding sources and payment settings.
You can fund your reimbursements either through your Brex business account or your US-based external bank account that has already been linked to your Brex account. If you cannot connect your external bank account through your dashboard, you won’t be able to use it for reimbursements.
Note: The main account needs to be funded by a US-based bank account.
By default, payments for your main account are pulled daily. Your payment cycle determines the frequency of the bulk pulls from your funding source and the batched payouts to your employees.
Following this, you can set up hierarchial approval and invite employees. All your invited employees can utilize Brex reimbursements through the web or mobile app. You can also set up reimbursements-only employees who don’t have access to a Brex card.
Brex Plus For each subsidiary entity
By default, reimbursements for all your subsidiaries are funded by your parent entity in USD. However, you can choose to separate reimbursement payments by configuring different funding sources, or locally funding your reimbursements for each individual entity.
Step 1: Go to Account > Reimbursements.
Step 2: Under Balance, you can see the entities that are paid with the parent. Click Manage.
Step 3: On the side panel, click Set up individual payment for the specific entity. Each entity can configure its own funding source and payment cycle, as applicable.
Note: Payment cycles are defaulted to “daily.” Your payment cycle determines the frequency of the bulk pulls from your funding source and the batched payouts to your employees.
Step 4: Click Review. Review details, agree to the terms, and click Confirm.
Viewing your reimbursement liability
Brex provides a global view of all your unpaid reimbursements liability across all your subsidiaries for easy global management. As reimbursements are paid out, this total balance will update automatically.
You can view your total approved reimbursement balance in your dashboard under Account > Reimbursements.
Payment flow for funding reimbursements
Brex processes reimbursements at the payment cycle configured for each entity. At the end of your entity's billing cycle, all approved reimbursement requests will be processed.
For USD-funded entities, one bulk amount covering all approved reimbursements will be pulled via ACH from your entity's configured funding source. For locally funded entities, an account or card admin will need to push money to the payment instructions provided to fund the payouts.
Upon receipt of funding, Brex will process batched payouts to your employees. This means that if there are five approved reimbursements for $10 each for a single employee since the last payment cycle, that employee will see a single transaction for $50 to their bank account. The employee will receive communication of this payment and the reimbursements that contributed to the total of $50 received.
You can set your preferred billing cycle in your dashboard and, if you have multiple entities, can customize the funding source and billing cycle per entity.
This is all done in your dashboard under Accounts > Reimbursements. Here, you can click on your specific entity and choose either Make payment or Manage payments.
Delivery time
In general, an employee will receive a reimbursement payout four to six days after it’s batched. Different types of reimbursements may have different timelines due to cross-border transfer timelines or payment settlement times.
If your entity has configured custom payment cycles (i.e., weekly on Fridays), then funding will only occur as per that payment cycle and will still take four to six days to be received by the employee.
The estimated time of arrival for a reimbursement can be seen by clicking on the detailed pane of that reimbursement in the dashboard.
Note: New accounts and new funding sources may experience longer than normal reimbursement periods due to ACH settlement risk. Please contact Brex Support if this is a prolonged issue.
Reimbursement accounting
All of Brex’s powerful accounting integrations are available for reimbursements. If your company/entity is configured to custom payment cycles (subject to ERP), reimbursements are exported by being accrued at the time of reimbursement approval and closed at the time of payment. Otherwise, reimbursements are exported as cash movements from your funding source.
Each entity can configure its own reimbursement accounting settings and set global entities to be accounted for in local currency by following the steps here.
Global reimbursements
Read more about Brex’s comprehensive global capabilities in What are global reimbursements?.
Brex Plus Locally funded reimbursements
Read more about Brex’s ability to receive local currency from your local bank accounts to fund reimbursements in What are locally funded reimbursements?.