Spend policies at Payhawk enable you to manage multiple cards with a predefined policy for configured spend limits and card settings for executives, managers, and employees.
All cards that have been assigned a spend policy are subject to the defined rules of that policy.
Benefits
You can define spend controls on a group level while managing all cards in bulk without the need to deal with individual controls.
You can set a limit for automatic approval of requests or define custom rules with multiple employees responsible for the approval of each threshold. You can also define a rigid spend policy and set a zero recurring monthly limit for employees, thus approving every request as it comes through the system.
With the supported advanced card controls, you can tailor the Payhawk spend policies to blacklist specific merchants or disallow spending in a given country or region, for example.
Spend limits
In Payhawk, spend limits define how much a cardholder can spend per single transaction. They can be set for individual cards or as part of your company's spend policies.
For more information on what spend limits in Payhawk are and the full list with them, see the section on spend limits for individual cards.
Card controls
In Payhawk, controls allow or block the spending of company funds. They can be set for individual cards or as part of your company's spend policies.
For more information on what card controls in Payhawk are and the full list with them, see the section on card controls for individual cards.
Overview of the card auto-blocking policy
In Payhawk, auto-blocking is an advanced spend-policy mechanism. If enabled, it automatically blocks the cards, associated with this spend policy, when the cardholders have not submitted their expenses within a pre-defined period.
To enable card auto-blocking, you need to define:
What Payhawk will treat as a "late" expense, that is, the number of days the documents for an expense have not been submitted.
The number of late expenses you want to tolerate before blocking the card.
Once you have enabled the card auto-blocking limit, the system will start to track all new expenses for the cards to which this spend policy is assigned.
To avoid unintentional blocking of cards, card auto-blocking applies only to new expenses.
As a result:
Cardholders who have late expenses will start seeing warnings both in the Payhawk web portal and mobile app which will prompt them to submit the missing documents.
If cardholders are close to the threshold for the maximum pre-defined late expenses, they will receive a 24-hour advance notification on their phones and emails.
If cardholders reach the maximum threshold, they will be notified that their cards are blocked by the spend policy of their company.
To unblock their cards, cardholders have to submit their late expenses. As soon as the late expenses fall below the threshold of the spend policy, Payhawk will automatically unblock their cards. For more information, see the articles on company policies affecting cardholders.
Card auto-blocking can be applied to individual employees' cards only.