How do reimbursements work?

Brex Empower™ supports comprehensive reimbursement capabilities for your entire global team. If employees happen to spend on their personal cards, account admins 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 admins 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)

You can activate the reimbursement product either by going to Accounts and clicking on Reimbursement Setup card or going to Company settings > Plan and clicking on Set up employee reimbursements. 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 admin 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.

Note: You can make a payment at any time, even mid-cycle. At the end of the cycle, the statement will reflect that the payment was initiated mid-cycle and will be accounted for in the final balance.

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 business 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?.