Edit expense policies in Airwallex to bring your company’s spending rules and automatically ensure every expense is compliant. By creating or generating an AI-friendly policy, you empower your Policy Agent to automatically evaluate expenses against your specific rules, providing fast feedback to employees and grounded insights for managers.
Why use expense policies?
Implementing expense policies within Airwallex Spend provides three key benefits:
Proactive compliance: Employees and managers can view linked policies at the top of their spend management channels (web and mobile apps) before they spend.
AI-powered evaluations: Your Policy Agent uses these rules to evaluate every expense, identifying issues based on specific sections of your policy.
Informed decision making: Employees and approvers receive supporting evidence for every flag, allowing them to confidently recall expenses, request resubmissions, or approve exceptions.
Expense policy lifecycle
Expense policies follow a structured lifecycle to ensure traceability and control:
Draft: Create and refine your policy without affecting live evaluations.
Published: The policy is active and being used by the Policy Agent.
Editing: Update an active policy while the previous version remains live.
Paused: Temporarily disable a policy so it is no longer used for evaluations.
Deleted: Permanently remove a policy from your organization.
Creating a policy
Navigate to Expense settings to find the built-in markdown editor. You can start a policy in two ways:
1. Uploading and optimizing for AI
You can upload existing documents (PDF, max 20mb) to generate a policy.
Airwallex transforms your document into a format optimized for the Policy Agent to reason and decide. During this process, private data is removed, and subjective or non-applicable mentions are sanitized.
To protect against data leaks, external links are removed.
You can bring multiple files together to create a single, comprehensive policy.
2. Generating a policy
Use the generator to bootstrap an expense policy from your Airwallex configuration, while following best practices from thousands of companies.
Either way, you have total control over the structure and specific wording of your rules past the creation of a draft.
Editing and customizing
While in the editor, you will define the following:
Name and Entities: Assign this policy to your entire organization or specific entities.
Sections and sub-sections: Organize your rules logically (e.g., Travel, Meals, Software). Section numbering is done automatically based on your content hierarchy.
Hidden notes: Add admin-only notes between sections. These are not visible to employees but help to fine tune the Policy Agent for certain sections. Use it to define edge cases or complex, sensitive rules for your policy agent.
Reorganize: Drag and drop sections to change the priority or flow of the document.
Delete: Use the trash icon to delete any section from the document.
Note: If you click Cancel or close the editor while in the draft phase, your changes will be discarded.
Publishing
When your policy is ready, hit Publish. You will be prompted to provide a summary of your changes. This is saved in the policy’s changelog to maintain a full audit trail for compliance.
Once published, the policy becomes immediately active. Your policy agent will begin evaluating all new expenses against this version.
Managing active policies
Monitoring feedback
Use the View activity menu to see how your policy is performing. Here, you can find direct feedback from users, including:
Suggestions for improving policy clarity.
Disputes where a user believes a policy flag should not apply.
Pausing or deleting
If a policy needs a major revamp or is no longer valid, you can Pause it. A paused policy remains in your system but will not be used by the Agent to evaluate expenses. Deleting a policy will remove it and its history (changelog, feedback) permanently.
Offline editing and downloads
You can download your policy as a PDF at any time, either to edit with external AI assistants or for offline stakeholder reviews. Optionally, you can include your hidden notes in the download.
If you edit your policy offline, use Upload a new version to replace the active one. If your offline document includes the previously downloaded policy and its hidden notes, Airwallex will automatically reconcile the sections for you.
FAQ
How can I have separate policies for each of my entities?
When creating or editing a policy, use the Entities selector near its title. You can create multiple policies and assign them to specific legal entities within your Airwallex organization to account for local tax laws or regional spending rules.
How can I add exceptions to tune down AI policy flags?
You can add a Hidden Note close to a section to specify its edge cases or exceptions. For example, "Allow taxi rides back home for overnight work". This helps your Policy Agent understand the nuances of your rule, and let go of certain scenarios not explicitly written in your expense policy.
How can I clarify gray areas to make AI policy flags more accurate?
Refine your policy by reviewing the Activity tab. If employees frequently flag a specific rule as "not applicable," use the markdown editor to add more specific "Sub-sections" that define the exact boundaries of that rule (e.g., defining "reasonable" meal costs with a hard currency limit).