Weekly Brex card spend and budget review posted to Slack

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.