# Weekly Brex card spend and budget review posted to Slack

> Every Monday morning, your finance channel gets a plain-English recap of last week's company card spend, with any budget close to its cap flagged at the top.

- Workflow type: agent
- Services: Brex, Slack Bot
- Categories: Finance, Operations
- Published: 2026-08-04

## What it does

- Pulls the last seven days of settled company card spend from Brex every Monday morning and compares the total against the previous seven days, so you can see whether spending is climbing or cooling off.
- Checks every budget and spend limit for how much of the cap has already been used, and calls out the ones that have crossed 75 percent or 90 percent.
- Highlights any single charge above a limit you set, which defaults to 1,000 dollars, plus the five biggest merchants and spending categories for the week.
- Posts the whole thing to your finance Slack channel as a short written summary that leads with the budgets at risk, not a wall of transactions.

## What you'll need

- A Brex account with corporate cards, and permission to view transactions, budgets, and spend limits
- A Slack workspace and a channel where the finance team wants the weekly recap to land
- Budgets or spend limits already set up in Brex, since the at-risk section is built from the caps you have defined there

## Prompt

Every Monday at 8am in our company timezone, run a weekly corporate card spend review using Brex and post it to our finance channel in Slack. Use a cron trigger for this. Brex is not a poll provider on this platform, so the schedule has to come from cron rather than a polling trigger.

Start by pulling spend data from Brex with List primary card transactions. I need two windows so the digest can show a trend: the last seven days of settled transactions, and the seven days before that for comparison. Page through the results using the cursor until there are no more pages, so a busy week does not get silently truncated.

Then pull current budget utilization. Use List budgets and List spend limits to get every budget and spend limit on the account along with its cap and how much has been used so far in the current period. For each one, work out the percentage of the cap consumed.

Important formatting rule: Brex returns monetary amounts as integer minor units plus a currency code, so an amount of 1000 with currency USD means ten dollars. Convert every amount to normal dollars and cents before it appears anywhere in the digest, and never print raw minor units. If more than one currency appears, group the totals by currency instead of adding different currencies together.

Now write a short narrative digest, not a raw transaction dump. It should cover total settled spend for the last seven days and how that compares with the prior seven days, stated as both the dollar change and the percent change, with one sentence of interpretation about what drove the difference. It should list the top five merchants and the top five spending categories by total amount. It should call out every single charge above a configurable large charge threshold that defaults to 1,000 dollars, naming the merchant, the amount, the category, and the cardholder where that information is available. Finally it should list every budget and every spend limit that has crossed 75 percent or 90 percent of its cap, making clear which threshold each one has passed.

Ordering matters a lot here. Lead the message with the budgets and spend limits at risk so the finance lead sees the urgent items in the first few lines, with anything over 90 percent above anything over 75 percent. Put the overall spend comparison next, then the large charges, then the top merchants and categories at the bottom. The finance lead should never have to scroll past a wall of transactions to find out that a budget is nearly exhausted.

Post the finished digest to our finance Slack channel using the Slack Bot Send a Message action. Let me configure which channel it goes to. Format it with Slack mrkdwn rather than standard Markdown, which means single asterisks for bold, and keep it scannable with short sections and bullets. Aim for something a busy person reads in under a minute.

Handle the quiet weeks gracefully. If no budget or spend limit has crossed 75 percent, say so in one clear line rather than omitting the section, because the absence of warnings is itself useful information. If there were no charges above the large charge threshold, say that too. If there were no settled transactions at all in the window, post a brief message saying there was no card spend last week instead of sending an empty report.

## How to customize

- Change the timing. Monday at 8am is just a starting point, and any day or hour works if your finance review happens midweek.
- Move the large charge threshold up or down from the 1,000 dollar default, and adjust the 75 and 90 percent warning levels to match how tightly you run budgets.
- Send it somewhere else, such as a private finance channel, a direct message to the finance lead, or a wider leadership channel.

## Example output

*Weekly card spend review, week of Mar 3*

:rotating_light: *Budgets at risk*
• *Q1 Marketing*: $23,400 of $25,000 used (94%). Over the 90% line with 3 weeks left in the period.
• *Sales Travel*: $7,900 of $10,000 used (79%). Crossed 75% this week.

*Spend summary*
Total settled spend was *$48,210*, up 12% from *$43,050* the week before. The increase came mostly from travel and software renewals rather than a broad rise across the board.

*Large charges above $1,000*
• AWS: $6,240 (Software)
• Delta Air Lines: $3,180 (Travel)
• WeWork: $2,400 (Facilities)

*Top merchants*
AWS $6,240 · Delta Air Lines $4,910 · WeWork $2,400 · Google Ads $2,180 · Notion $1,050

*Top categories*
Software $14,300 · Travel $11,750 · Advertising $8,400 · Facilities $5,200 · Meals $3,900

## FAQ

### Will this work if we have not set up any budgets in Brex?

Yes. The spending recap, top merchants, top categories, and large charge callouts all still work. The budgets at risk section will simply say that nothing is close to its cap, and it becomes more useful once you add budgets or spend limits in Brex.

### Does this move money or change anything in Brex?

No. It only reads your transactions, budgets, and spend limits, then writes a summary in Slack. It never freezes a card, changes a limit, or blocks a purchase.

### What counts as last week's spend?

The seven days before the summary runs, using settled transactions. A charge that has not settled yet will show up in a later week's recap once it clears, which keeps the totals consistent with what you see in Brex.

### Can we get this more often than weekly?

Yes. The same summary can run daily or twice a week. Weekly tends to be the sweet spot for a narrative recap, while teams who want faster warnings usually keep the weekly digest and tighten the large charge threshold.

### Who will the Slack message appear to come from?

It is posted by a bot in the channel you choose, so it is clearly an automated recap rather than a message from a specific person on the finance team.

Use this prompt in General Input: https://www.generalinput.com/prompts/weekly-brex-card-spend-and-budget-review-posted-to-slack