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 Expend Flex cards.
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.
Expend Mastercard card
Expend Mastercard card
Policy type
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”):
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
You can optionally 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.
Expend Visa card
Expend Visa card
Enter the allowance amount and then select the period to which it applies (we call them “spending windows”):
Daily
Weekly
Monthly
Indefinitely
For the Daily, Weekly and Monthly options, 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
You can optionally 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.
Allow spending at weekends
If selected, the cardholder can use their card over the weekend.
Clear the checkbox to allow only “work week” spending.
Refunds and spending policies
See below for information on how refunds affect the allowance amount of a spending policy.
Expend Mastercard cards
Expend Mastercard cards
If a refund is issued for a transaction, the refund amount is not returned to the spending policy allowance. 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.
Expend Visa cards
Expend Visa cards
If a refund is issued for a transaction, the refund amount may be added to the spending policy’s current allowance. If a user has a recurring allowance (Daily, Weekly, Monthly) and the refund occurs outside the period to which the allowance applied when the original transaction was made, the amount they have available to spend may be more than usual.
For example, if they have a weekly allowance (which resets at the start of the week) and the refund occurs in a week following the original transaction, their usual allowance plus the refund amount will be available for that week. If necessary, please adjust the spending policy as appropriate.