Spending policies

Learn about keeping company spending in check with spending policies

Updated over a week ago

With an Expend Flex Card you can achieve a great amount of control over cardholders’ spending. You can set up allowances – either a single amount or an amount per day/week/month – or give a cardholder unrestricted access to the funds in your company’s Expend account. This means that there’s no need to manually transfer funds to the cards (as with the Expend Classic Card) since access to company funds is managed automatically based on the way that the spending policy has been set up. 

Please note that spending policies are only available on the Expend Flex Card.

Choosing a spending policy

When you order an Expend Flex Card, you are asked to set a policy type. We need this to set up the card, but you can change it at any point if you need to.

You can choose between the following spending policies:

Unrestricted

The cardholder will have unrestricted access to the funds in the company's Expend account. Please take card choosing this policy – it may be appropriate for a company director, but it probably isn’t the best choice for most members.

Simple Allowance

Set a single amount that the user can spend. Funds are taken directly from the company's Expend account.

When you update the allowance, it effectively resets and starts over. Example: The user starts out with an allowance of £50, spends £40, and therefore has £10 left over to spend. If you change the allowance to £100, the user has £100 to spend and the money already spent isn’t deducted from this.

Recurring Allowance

Set an amount that the user can spend every day, week or month. Funds are taken directly from the company's Expend account.

You can select one of the following options (we call them “spending windows”):

  • Day

  • Week – starting on Monday

  • Work week – starting on Monday (choose this policy if you want to prevent the cardholder from using their card on weekends)

  • Month – starting on the 1st of each month

The allowance amount is reset at the start of each spending window – the amount left unspent from the previous window is not retained.

Policy Expiry

When setting up a spending policy, you can set an expiry date in the Policy expiry field. This policy will be in effect up to and including that date. After that, the cardholder won’t be able to make payments unless you set a new policy. If you leave the field empty, the policy will be in effect indefinitely or until you make changes.

Refunds and spending policies

Please note that, if a refund is issued for a transaction, the refund amount is not returned to the spending policy. We cannot predict when a refund will be issued and to what spending window it should then apply. (For example, if the user has a monthly policy, whether it should be applied to the current month, the previous month, or even the next month.) If a user is running low on funds, you can adjust their spending policy to make more funds available.

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