Table of Contents
Overview
Airwallex allows admins to set up a late expense policy for card expenses and, optionally, lock cards if an employee fails to comply with this policy. This feature incentivises timely expense submission and reduces time spent chasing down receipts by the finance team. Turning this feature on will retroactively apply to past expenses, but all past expenses will have a grace period equal to your submission deadline, ensuring that no cards are unsuspectingly frozen immediately upon activation.
Setup
In your expense settings section, you will find a section titled Late expense policy. This section has 3 components:
- Expense submission deadline: Determines after how many days an expense is considered late. The default setting will be to consider expenses beyond 14 days late. You may edit this submission deadline to help train your employees to submit in a timely manner. Even with card freezing disabled, expenses beyond this deadline will be denoted as late, with a gentle nudge encouraging employees to submit them as soon as possible.
- Freeze cards with late expenses: Optional configuration to automatically freeze employee cards when expenses are late; this setting is default off. Company cards are never included in this policy.
- Exempt cards: Select cards you'd like to exempt from this policy. Exempt cards will never be frozen or marked as late.
How card freezing works
Card freeze timing
- Upon enabling and saving your card freezing configuration, all past expenses have a grace period equal to your submission deadline
- Each day, Airwallex runs a check at the same time to see if any expenses are near late, defined as 24 hours before becoming late, or late.
- Expenses are counted from the time that the transaction settled
- If expenses within 1 day of the submission deadline are detected, employees will be notified via push and email that their card is at risk of being frozen tomorrow due to late expenses.
- If these expense(s) are not submitted and become late the next day, the card associated with these expenses will be frozen. The cardholder will be notified their card is frozen and they need to submit their late expenses to unfreeze it.
- Immediately after any late expenses are submitted, the card will be unfrozen.
Can admins unfreeze cards frozen due to late expenses?
There are two ways to unfreeze a card that’s been frozen for late expenses:
- Submit all outstanding, late expenses. Please note that this does not mean all expenses must be submitted, only the ones that are late.
- Add card to exempt list in setting by an admin (immediately unfreezes a card frozen for late expenses and ensures it will never be frozen again)
The general unfreeze action does not work in this scenario.
Scenario: A cardholder incurred expenses on Jan 1 and Jan 15 with missing receipts. On Jan 16, their admin set the submission deadline to 7 days and enabled card freezing for late expenses.
- If both expenses are submitted within 7 days, neither become late
- Note: this cardholder receives a 7 day grace period because the unsubmitted expenses were incurred prior to the admin enabling the card freezing setting.
- If either expense remains unsubmitted on day 6, the cardholder receives a notification to submit them.
- If either expense remains unsubmitted on day 7, the card will be frozen and the cardholder will be notified.
- When all late expenses are submitted, the card will be instantly unfrozen.
What happens if I adjust my card freezing settings later on?
- If card freezing is currently enabled and you’d like to edit your submission deadline:
- Changing your submission deadline to be more lenient will re-evaluate all late expenses with this new deadline in mind. For instance, if the submission deadline changes from late = 7 days to late = 30 days, all late expenses between 7 and 30 days will no longer be considered late, but expenses 31 days and beyond will remain late.
- Changing your submission deadline to be more stringent will reset the timer for all expenses to zero, to help avoid overly-aggressive card freezing. For instance, if the submission deadline changes from late = 7 days to late = 3 days, all previously late expenses will no longer be considered late, and nothing will be marked as late until 3 days at the earliest. All previous expenses receive a 3 day grace period to adjust to the new, more stringent policy.
- If you would like to disable card freezing altogether – either temporarily or permanently – all cards will nearly instantly be unfrozen (within minutes).
- If you re-enable card freezing in the future, all cards will have a grace period equal to the submission deadline (same as initial activation).
Other FAQs
When does the ‘late’ timer begin counting from?
- The time the transaction settled, typically within a day or two of the transaction occurring.
How does card freezing work for users with multiple cards?
- If any of their cards are in violation of the policy, that individual card will be frozen. This policy is applied on a per-card basis, so it’s possible for a cardholder with multiple cards to have some in violation of the policy (and frozen) while others are still active.
What happens if an exempt card is removed from the exemption list?
- All incomplete expenses from that card will have a grace period equal to the submission deadline
What happens if I exempt a card frozen for late expenses?
- It will instantly be unfrozen (and will never be frozen again for late expenses, so long as it’s not removed)
What about archived expenses?
- Archived expenses are not counted (i.e., they will never be considered late). For the occasional instance where an employee does not need to submit an expense (perhaps one that they know will be refunded), an admin can archive the expense for them to prevent it being marked as late.