What is a budget?

A budget is an easier way to manage and proactively approve expenses for your teams, vendors, stipends, and more. When you use a budget, you can set dynamic spending limits that aren’t tied to one specific card.

If you are working with more than one budget, your employees can have multiple budgets assigned to them for all necessary areas of spend. Each employee will have one Brex card, which can be used to spend from any of their budgets. Budgets can be linked and delinked to the card in their dashboard or mobile app.

Anyone can file a budget request and once it’s approved, the card can be used immediately.

When creating a budget, admins can assign their standard company expense policy or a customized policy to guide spend for that particular budget. Before making a purchase, employees can quickly see which rules apply to their budgets. Budget notifications preferences can be customized in Settings. For more on this, visit How can I manage notification preferences?.

As an admin or manager, when setting a budget’s limit from your dashboard, you can choose whether you want the limit to be flexible or not. Flexible limits allow employees to spend beyond the assigned amount of the budget. Over-limit expenses are completed with the merchant, but are then sent for approval from theadmin or designated approver.

Nested budgets

If they have access to more than one budget, account admins, card admins, and managers can create nested budgets within existing, or parent, budgets. For example, if you have a budget for $100 dedicated to travel expenses, you might want to break it up into two nested budgets — allocating $40 for meals and $60 for gas. You can assign a custom policy for each nested budget.

Note: We don't currently restrict you from creating nested budgets with a higher limit than the parent budget, but spend will be restricted if you exceed the parent's limit.

Viewing budgets

You can view budgets you manage (as a manager) or all budgets across your account (if you’re an account or card admin) from the Budgets page in your dashboard.

As an account or card admin, your default view will be of top-level budgets, but you can click the down arrow to the left of the budget name to view the hierarchy of nested budgets.

As an employee, you can view your budgets by clicking on View all budgets and cards from Wallet.