Admin Guide: Expense automation rules

Table of Contents

• Overview
• Mappings
• Advanced rules
• Rule hierarchy
• FAQs

Overview

For finance teams, it’s critical to have expenses completed swiftly and correctly. Airwallex Spend leverages a multi-dimensional, tiered approach to automate expense coding to help finance teams close their books fast.

By default, Airwallex applies AI-refined field automation. This will improve over time based on your past expense behaviour. However, Airwallex also enables admins to create custom automation rules themselves, having immediate effect on future expenses. Automation rules will always take precedence over Airwallex’s default AI pre-filling.

Mappings

Mappings are designed for cases where an Airwallex condition lines up directly with desired accounting outcomes; a one-to-one relationship between the condition and the accounting outcome. The available conditions for Mappings currently are:

• Employee fields: configured manually in user management or automatically via HRIS
  • Department
  • Location

• Transaction category: determined by the category of a merchant of a card transaction 
  • Only applies to card expenses, not reimbursements 

Example mappings:

• Airwallex Department to Accounting Provider Department: pre-fills data for all card expenses and reimbursements according to this relationship
• Airwallex Location to Accounting Provider Region: pre-fills data for all card expenses and reimbursements according to this relationship
• Airwallex Transaction category to GL code: pre-fills all card expense GL codes based on the nature or the spend

Advanced rules

Advanced rules allow you to more flexibly mix and match Airwallex conditions to one-or-more accounting automations.

When creating an advanced rule, you’ll first be asked to input the relevant conditions for this rule to apply. If multiple conditions are specified, all of them must be met in order for the automation to apply. Available conditions are:

• Employee fields and user data: configured manually in user management or automatically via HRIS
  • Department
  • Location
  • Entity
  • User
• Transaction category: determined by the category of a merchant of a card transaction 
  • Only applies to card expenses, not reimbursements 
• Card: individual Airwallex cards
  • Only applies to card expenses, not reimbursements 

After specifying the conditions, you’ll then determine the actions (or automations) that take place when these conditions are met. 

Example advanced rule use cases:

• Pre-coded cards: solidifies the relationship between certain cards and accounting values. For example, if there's a finance office team card that's only used for office supplies, an advanced rule could be to always pre-code it to the same GL code, Department, and Region with a pre-written description that says “San Francisco office supplies.”
• Multi-condition rules: combine together fields like Department and Transaction category. For example, a rule that automates all Restaurant expenses from the Sales Department, because the sales department is only permitted to spend at restaurants with certain clients.

Rule hierarchy

Multiple rules can apply to the same expense, so long as they’re automating different fields. In the event that multiple rules try to automate the same field with a different value, Airwallex has a tiered hierarchy that determines which rule to use based on the priority of the rule and condition(s). First, advanced rules always take precedence over mappings. If two advanced rules attempt to automate the same field, the one with the higher rank – or more specific – condition takes precedence according to the following order:

1. Card
2. User
3. Department
4. Location
5. Transaction category
6. Entity

In the event of the following rules and mappings attempting to automate the same field,

• A rule using Location and Entity will take precedence over a Department mapping
• A rule using a Card condition will always take precedence over everything else
• A rule using a User condition will take precedence over a rule using a Location and 

Department, because the User condition is the highest priority

In all cases, automation rules take precedence over Airwallex’s default AI. 

FAQs

Do automation rules apply to past expenses?

No, only expenses created after the time of rule-creation

Where do I set up automation rules?

Navigate to the Expenses tab and select “Automations” along the top of your screen. This feature is currently not available on mobile.

Can I disable the default AI automation?

Not at this time. If there are specific instances of miscodings, we recommend creating rules to apply your desired automations. In the rare event you are having consistent issues, please email expenses@airwallex.com.

I’m not seeing Department or Location conditions

In order to use Department and Location as conditions, you must first configure them in user management. See the employee fields guide.

Do automation rules apply to reimbursements?

Yes, but if this is your intent, be sure to use conditions that can apply to reimbursements. Transaction category, for instance, only applies to card expenses.