Our Spend Limits feature allows you to include your employee spending policies within Spendesk based on an expense category, a limit for a period (such as per day or per month), and use this to automate approval rules.
For example, you could configure a policy that allows employees to spend up to €50 per day on Food. You can create additional flexibility by combining periods.
There is also a set of 'advanced' features that require a specific plan / add-on, notably:
Auto-approval when under a limit
Block requests when over a limit
User assignment & multiple rules per expense category
In practice, this then can benefit in the following ways
Employees are informed in real time whether their request is within the policy limits or not
Approvers have the context of impacted policy limits when reviewing a request
Finance teams have visibility of the impacted policy limits when reviewing expense claims, and can use this to quickly update the reimbursement amount
Approval can be automated for requests within policy limits, or requests can be blocked if they go over a limit, saving time
Configuration
To configure a spend limit, navigate to Settings > Company Rules > Spend Limits.
Press Create a Spend Limit to begin adding a policy limit.
Basic rules
You can configure the following attributes:
The expense category that the limit applies to
The limits for this category, you can add any number of these based on an amount and a period:
Per request
Per day
Per week
Per month
Per year
Example:
A limit for 'Food' that is:
- €25 per request
- €75 per day
Advanced rules
These additional options are only available as part of an additional plan, contact your account manager if you don't have them available:
Defining different rules for different users, i.e. if you want to have a specific group of users with higher limits, or even no limit
Automating approval logic:
Auto-approve requests within the limit
Block requests over the limit
A name for the limit (if it's not the default)
For example, a limit for 'Monthly Learning Allowance' with €50 per month, means that if any user raises requests for over €50 in a single month they will be warned that they are going over the limit.
Unless Block approval is configured, the approver may still review and approve the request.
Approval rules
To streamline approval, you can decide that for requests within a spend limit, no manual approval is needed.
To do this, select Skip approval for the spend limit.
You can also decide to block any requests that would put the user over their spend limit.
To do this, select Block request for the spend limit. Please note this will prevent users from raising any requests that put them over any spend limit.
User assignment
You can create multiple spend limits for each category and assign users to each. For example, for food allowances you might want some groups of users to have higher limits.
You can decide which spend limit is defined as the 'default' (i.e. applies to all users), then add additional spend limits for the same category to select specific users to apply it to.
Default:
Specific users:
Note that each user can only be assigned to a single limit for each expense category (e.g. they can't be assigned to 2 limits for 'Food').
Usage
When raising a request, users will be warned if a request puts them over any limit for the selected expense category:
Approvers will see a similar warning when reviewing a request for approval. If there are multiple limit periods set for the expense category, these will all be shown:
Finance teams will also see this note next to the reimbursement amount with the option to reduce it to match the limit:
FAQ
How are different currencies handled?
Different currencies are handled by using a recent exchange rate in order to correctly verify if the amount is within the limit, regardless of currency.
What types of spend impact on Spend Limits?
As a rule, all types of spend that specify an expense category and date of expense will impact on the relevant spend limit, including:
Expense claims
Invoices
Per diems
Mileage
Card payments (virtual and physical)
Single use card requests
Here are some notable limitations:
Per diem - spend limits callout & 'block request' not supported
Mileage - 'block request' not supported
Recurring card requests - no impact (as no date is provided)
Multi-use card requests - no impact (as no date is provided)
Physical card top-ups - no impact (as no expense category is provided)