Introduction:

The Mesh Reimbursement Solution allows customers to manage expense requests and approvals, offering great flexibility in disbursing reimbursements. Customers can use Mesh to disburse funds directly to an employee's bank account or pay employees in cash, by check, salary, or other relevant means.

1. To fully leverage the Mesh reimbursement solution, both the Reimbursement and Payout modules must be enabled in the Mesh backend. If this feature isn't currently available for your company, please contact our team at support@meshpayments.com to learn more and discuss enabling it.
2. Your Mesh Administrator needs to create a reimbursement policy and toggle on the 'Reimburse with Mesh' option in the 'Reimbursement' section under the 'Company Settings'.
3. Users who want to receive reimbursement directly in their bank account need to add their bank details to their Mesh profile.
4. Users need to request reimbursement (e.g., out-of-pocket expenses, mileage, travel-related expenses) and await approval. 
5. Users need to wait for a Mesh Administrator to disburse the funds to their account per their pending requests.

Workflow 

The Reimbursements page offers an improved user experience for reviewing and scheduling out-of-pocket reimbursement payments. To access this page, please log into the Mesh platform as a user with an Admin/Pro profile and click on the Reimbursements page under the Transactions section.

The Reimbursements page is divided into the following tabs: 'Expenses to review', 'Expenses to pay', 'Scheduled payments', 'Failed payments', 'Paid payments', and 'All expenses'. The functionality of each tab is described below. The user mentioned (i.e., Admin/Pro) is referred to as an Authorized user. 

📑Expense to review

Expenses still in the approval flow will be directed to this tab. Authorized users can click on the request to view its details, but the call to action (i.e., approve or decline) is handled under the 'Pending My Approval' page. 

📑Expense to pay

The 'Expense to pay' tab consolidates approved reimbursements per employee. Search for or select an employee, and then schedule a payment for specific requests or for all of them. 

Note: You can click 'All Reimbursement Requests' to display all requests, then use the filters to search for specific requests and schedule payments accordingly. 

📑Scheduled payments

The 'Scheduled payments' tab presents the queue of scheduled payments.

For payments made directly by Mesh to the employee's bank account (i.e. automatic), all expenses added to a payment by the daily cutoff (1 PM EST) will be processed by Mesh the next day. Mesh will automatically lock and mark the payment as paid. Once the payment is completed, the transaction will be visible on your transactions page. Payments made by Mesh require no additional action.

For payments made externally to Mesh by the Customer finance team (i.e. manual), we recommend locking the payment or using the 'Lock and Export' feature to export the total amount to a CSV file. After completing the external payment process, return to this page and mark the payment as paid. This action will reflect this expense as paid expenses for the mentioned employee.

Once a payment is locked, no additional expenses can be added. Any new expenses scheduled for payment will initiate a new payment for the employee, likely to be processed in the next period.

Notes:

• The mentioned features are available if the payout option is enabled.
• If customers use Mesh to disburse expenses and employees provide their personal bank account, the payment column will display the icon 'Automatic'. Otherwise, it will display 'Manual'. In July 2024, we renamed 'Manual' and 'Automatic' payments. 'Mesh Direct' now replaces 'Automatic,' meaning payments are made directly from the Mesh bank account and deducted from the customer's Mesh balance. The 'Manual' label has been removed and left blank. Users can filter payments by 'Mesh Direct' or 'Indirect,' where 'Indirect' indicates the customer is reimbursing from a source other than Mesh.
• If customers prefer to handle payments outside Mesh (i.e., Manual), administrators can select all the relevant records and click 'Lock, Export & Sync'. Once the employees are paid it is possible to return to this menu and mark all records as 'Paid'.

📑Failed payments 

The 'Failed payments' section displays all unsuccessful attempts to pay an employee using the Mesh reimbursement payment option. Insufficient funds in the company's Mesh account or incorrect bank account details on the employee's end can result in a failed payment.

Note: Resolve any issue before rescheduling the expenses for payment.

📑Paid payments

The 'Paid payments' tab presents all the reimbursements that have been successfully paid. This means that funds moved from the company's Mesh account, via Mesh's bank, to the employee's personal bank account. Each paid reimbursement will appear on the transactions page with the name of the person to whom funds were transferred.

Note: Mesh will post a 'Reverse Payment Transaction' on the Transactions page if a payment fails after being marked as paid.

📑All expenses 

The 'All expense' tab presents all the expenses, including their status (e.g., declined, approved, pending, paid, etc.). 

Notes:

• The option to disburse funds directly to an employee's bank account is available only for domestic transactions within the United States.
• Each tab includes filters that authorized users can use to locate specific reimbursements. 
• Each tab includes the option to export a report with the presented data. 
• It is possible to sync expenses to the ERP.