Mercury makes it easy to manage team spend without the mess. This guide will help you set up the right cards and controls to manage your team's expenses.
Quick setup guide
Want a lightweight way to manage expenses? Here’s a simple setup most teams can start with:
- Invite teammates to Mercury: Give them permission to spend without access to account balances or banking details
- Issue virtual or physical cards: Set spending limits and controls for each card
- Turn on receipt requirements: Automatically request receipts for any transaction over $75
Keep reading for the full guide to Mercury’s expense management tools, including accounting integrations, spend policies, and approvals for larger or more complex teams.
Invite your team and set permissions
The first step to enabling team spend is bringing the right people into your Mercury account, and we’ve designed that to be safe and flexible. You can invite teammates without giving them access to sensitive banking details, and assign only the visibility and permissions they need.
You can also automate access with an HR integration or manage it manually — and if you want to see exactly what they’ll experience, you can even preview what your employees can see before you officially invite them.
To get started, invite your team members and give them the right level of access.
- Sync your HR and payroll system (like Gusto, Justworks, Deel, and more) to automatically onboard and offboard team members
- Or invite them via email from the Team tab in your dashboard
As employees join, they’ll be automatically organized by department if you have your HR and payroll system integrated. If you invited them via email, you can add them manually to the correct department.
Set roles and permissions
Once you’ve invited your employees to Mercury, you can either choose to give them a default role (with pre-set permissions), or create custom roles with more granular permissions.
- Default roles: Admin or Employee
- Custom roles: Create granular permission sets (e.g., card creation, spend approvals, accounting access, etc.)
Most teammates will be added as Employees — a role designed for safe, limited access. Here’s what they can and can’t do:
- Cards and reimbursements: Issue cards to employees and let them submit reimbursement requests
- Visibility: Restricted from viewing account balances, routing details, or company-wide transactions
- Access: Limited to their own cards and expenses — no visibility into other teammates’ activity
Issue cards and enable reimbursements
There are two ways team members can spend money in Mercury: by spending with their Mercury card or by submitting out-of-pocket expenses for reimbursement.
If a teammate makes recurring or predictable purchases — like travel, software, or supplies — it’s often easier to issue them a card upfront. Mercury offers both debit and credit cards, including the IO card, which lets you control spend limits and categories while earning 1.5% cashback on all credit purchases.
For one-off or unexpected expenses, reimbursement is a flexible way to keep things moving without needing to issue a card.
Issue team cards
- Create virtual or physical cards in seconds in the Cards page of your dashboard
- Set spending limits, lock cards to specific merchants (e.g., Figma, Google Ads), and pause access anytime
Enable reimbursements
- Allow employees to submit out-of-pocket expenses for approval and reimbursement — They can upload receipts directly in Mercury, or simply email them to reimbursements@mercury.com.
- Admins or managers can review and approve these requests from their dashboard
Create spend policies
Spend policies help guide employee behavior and keep your finances stay compliant and organized. In Mercury, you can set different requirements for cards and reimbursements to match your company’s needs — including requirements for receipts and expense categorization.
Require receipts
- The IRS advises that all business expenses over $75 should have a corresponding receipt for tax filing purposes, so we’ve made it easy to require receipts in Mercury. You can also choose to require receipts for card spend
- Employees can upload receipts directly in the app or simply forward them to receipts@mercury.com
Require categorization
- For both reimbursements and card spend, you can create custom, employee-friendly categories so employees can specify what type of spend their transactions fall under
- When you require categorization, employees will be prompted to set a category for certain transactions based on the rules you set, and when paired with accounting categorization rules, this will ensure they are properly coded for accounting
Simplify tracking and receipts
Your spend policies are only effective if your team can follow them. Mercury gives employees the tools to track their own spend, upload receipts, and categorize expenses — without the need for constant hand-holding. It's a setup that saves your finance team time and reduces end-of-month surprises.
Once employees have card access and spend policies are in place, they can:
- View their cards, limits, and recent transactions in one place
- Upload receipts from their email inbox, phone, or dashboard
- Set up auto-forwarding rules from their inbox so receipts are uploaded to Mercury automatically
- Easily tag expenses with the right category so your finance team can avoid guesswork
Automate your accounting
Mercury is designed to help your finance and ops teams move faster, not add more manual work. With direct integrations, custom rules, and AI-powered categorization, you can make expense data flow cleanly into your accounting system.
Connect your ERP
- Integrate Mercury with QuickBooks, Xero, or NetSuite
- Once you’ve integrated Mercury with your accounting software, you can import your GL codes
- We also recommend setting up custom categories your employees can select when submitting reimbursements or tagging card spend.
Create categorization rules
Mercury makes it easy to categorize transactions at scale by applying GL codes automatically based on rules you set.
In your accounting settings, you can create rules that map transactions based on specific attributes — like merchant, card, employee, or keyword. For example, you might automatically assign transactions from “United Airlines” to your “007 - Airfare” GL code.
Categorization rules follow a clear hierarchy — when more than one rule could apply, Mercury will use the most specific one:
- Card-level rules
- Employee-level rules
- Merchant-level rules
- Keyword-level rules
This lets you control spend categorization with precision — and ensures the right codes are applied, every time.
Use AI-powered auto-categorization
We pre-fill GL codes based on your categorization history and AI models. You can accept or overwrite them before syncing to your accounting software.
Sync transaction data to your accounting software
- Once a transaction is ready to sync, click the “Mark as ready” action icon
- Then click "Sync in the top right to sync the transactions you’ve marked as ready to your accounting software.
Set up approvals
The right controls give your team autonomy without sacrificing oversight. With Mercury, you can build approval flows that match your org structure and risk profile — from single-manager reviews to dual-approver setups.
- Set approval flows for payments by navigating to the Approvals section in your team settings
- Enable dual-approver workflows for added oversight
Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column N.A., Members FDIC.
The IO Card is issued by Patriot Bank, Member FDIC, pursuant to a license from Mastercard®. To receive cash back, your Mercury accounts must be open and in good standing, meaning they cannot be suspended, restricted, past due, or otherwise in default.