This article covers how to enroll in Expense Management and set up the account as an account owner or an account manager.
Ready to get started? Play this 3 minute video to learn how to streamline your business expenses or continue reading.
Getting started
Primary account owners or account managers can enroll their business into Capital One’s Expense Management. After the business is enrolled, the primary account owner can set up the tool on their own or delegate the process to another employee. If an account manager enrolls the business into Expense Management, they’ll be responsible for completing the account set up and can’t delegate this to another employee.
Once you have enrolled in Expense Management, you can set up configurations according to your business' needs.
Access Expense Management
After you’ve signed in to your Capital One account on your desktop, you’ll be able to access Expense Management in 3 ways:
Go to Account details, select More Account Services, then select the Manage Expenses link under Expenses and Reporting.
Go to Account details, then select the Learn about managing expenses button above your transactions.
Go to Account details, select the tab Payments and Expenses, then select the Manage Expenses link.
Enroll in Expense Management
Next, you’ll view a page displaying an informational video, benefits, the enrollment process and frequently asked questions. To begin enrolling into Expense Management, select the Start enrolling button.
Terms and conditions will appear on the page. Select the Enroll in Expense Management button to enroll your account.
Give Expense Management access to employees
As the primary account owner, you can then select the employees you’d like to enroll into Expense Management. Employees must have Capital One online access and contact information—a phone number and an email address—saved to their account to use Expense Management. View the Guide to enable online access for support on how to enable online access for your employees.
Confirm your selections, then select the Give access button.
It may take a moment for the enrollment to complete. Once your business has successfully enrolled, there will be a confirmation screen with the primary account owner’s name, phone number, and the number of employees you gave Expense Management access.
To begin the account set up process, select the Set up your account button.
Set up your account
You’ll be directed to an account set up page. On this page you can:
Complete essential steps to get the most of Expense Management
Complete optional steps to optimize your account
Take a tour of the tool
Access resources like videos and the help center
This page will be available to all admins on the account.
Essential steps
Essential steps help you fully leverage the power of Expense Management. Default settings will be applied to any essential step left incomplete after 45 days.
Assign default administrator
The first essential step is to assign a default administrator, who is responsible for completing expenses on behalf of any employee who doesn’t have access to Expense Management.
Once the default administrator is assigned, select the Save button.
Review employees and manage roles
With this step, assign Expense Management-specific roles to the employees with access to the tool. Roles selected during this step only apply to Expense Management and don’t affect the employee’s role (e.g., account manager or authorized user) on your Capital One business account.
Review the list of all employees and confirm their Expense Management-specific role.
Account managers are designated as admins by default. Admins can view expenses and reports for the entire business and edit Expense Management settings.
Authorized users are designated spenders by default. Spenders can view their expenses and reports, but they can't view overall business spending.
You can change these default designations for each employee by selecting the appropriate role in the drop-down near each employee’s name.
Once the roles are assigned, select the Save button.
Set employee approvals
This step allows you to set up approvers for expense reports. Approvers can edit, send back and approve expense reports. An employee’s expense report will be directed to their approver once it has been submitted.
Choose the approver for each employee.
If you need to set up additional approvals for expenses beyond a set amount, select the Add 2nd approver button.
Enter the required amount and select the Add 2nd approver button.
An additional column will be added to the list of employees and you can assign a second approver from the drop-down list.
After approvers are set, select the Save button.
Customize receipt requirements
This step allows you to decide if and when to require your employees to submit receipts.
Select a rule for receipt requirements. The selected rule applies to all expenses, for all employees.
The rules that can be set are:
Require receipts for all expenses: All expenses must have a receipt to save or submit for approval in an expense report.
Require receipts for expenses greater than: Expenses over a chosen dollar amount must have a receipt to save and submit the expenses for approval in an expense report.
No receipts required: Employees can save and submit expenses for approval without receipts.
If you’ve selected to require all receipts or receipts for expenses over a certain amount, you can also allow for exceptions to your requirement. This is helpful if an employee loses a receipt or doesn’t receive one. Select the Allow employees to save expenses without receipts checkbox to allow for exceptions. The employee will be required to provide a reason for the missing receipt.
Once you’ve set your requirement, select the Save receipt requirements button.
Automate report submission
The last essential step allows you to automate the process of creating and submitting expense reports. Automation submits all your employees’ complete expenses in an expense report for approval on a set day of each week or date every month.
You can choose if expense reports will be auto-submitted monthly or weekly, then select the days or dates. To submit reports on the last day of the month, select Last day from the list.
Select the Save button to proceed.
Optional steps
The optional steps guide you to set up additional features that make managing expenses more efficient.
Opt in to text messages
If you opt in to text messages, you’ll receive a text message each time you make a purchase. You can reply to this message with an image of the receipt and any expense details.
Read the Opt in to text messages help article for more details.
Add merchant-based expense rules
Expense rules are auto-filled expense fields (i.e., category or cost center) based on the merchant’s name. For example, a rule can be set to categorize all charges from Uber as taxis, or all charges from Amazon as office supplies.
Expense rules prevent employees from entering incorrect expense details, which means your accounting team won’t have to send the expense back or manually correct it.
The Set up expense rules help article provides in-depth instructions.
Integrate your accounting software
Connect your accounting software to your Expense Management account. An integration allows you to export all expenses and their details—like receipts, purpose, cost code—to your software and import data to Expense Management.
For full instructions, visit the Integrating with Accounting Software help articles.
Edit settings
You can make changes to any of the essential and optional steps from the Settings. To access the settings, select the Settings tab near the bottom of the left side panel.
Adding employees to Expense Management after enrollment
After you complete account set up, the primary account owner and any account managers can go to the Tasks, business expenses and business expense reports pages from the Expense Management home page.
To give or remove employee access to Expense Management, select the Manage access tab.
If you need further assistance setting up your account, contact our support team at support@capitalone-fylehq.com.