The Mesh Spend Categories engine offers a customizable classification tool that catalogs your expenses and enhances automation. The engine translates straightforward category terminology into complex finance coding schemes, ensuring accuracy and ease of use. Spend Categories streamline end-of-month financial activities, resulting in faster reviews, minimized data entry errors, and significantly boosted productivity.

Follow the steps below to enable and set Spend Categories for your entity:

1. Contact our team at support@meshpayments.com to enable the feature. 

2.  Log into the platform as a power user (i.e., Admin or Pro), navigate to the Company Settings, and scroll down to the Spend Categories section. Once configured properly in the Mesh backend backend, 'Spend Categories' will be enabled. 

Note: As soon as the feature is enabled, a 'Spend Category' column and filter will be added to your Transactions and Accounting pages. Furthermore, a 'Spend Categories' checkbox will be added to Custom Fields under the mapping section

3. Click on the 'Manage Spend Categories' button.

3.1 Mesh preseeds several including travel if this feature is enabled for your entity. 

3.2 You can add or modify the categories. To add click the 'Add Spend Categories' button, check relevant categories, and click on 'Add'. 

4. For each category added, you will need to:

4a. Set a Receipt & Memo policy (i.e., required or not required) and add a Memo Template.

4b. Map each Spend Category to the relevant custom fields with lists coming from the ERP (e.g., Account GL, VAT code, Department, etc.).

Notes:

• You can toggle ON to disable the category. 
• You can click the 'Show disabled spend categories' checkbox to display all categories.
• You can click the View category icon to navigate to the category's dedicated page.
• Mapping should follow your finance department's guidelines.
• You do NOT need to map all the Custom Field values to a Spend Category. Users can also select spend categories and or values for custom fields later when requesting a budget or tagging a transaction. 
• If you cannot see one or more of the Custom Fields created for your entity, you'll need to navigate to Company settings >> Custom Fields and make sure that you check the 'Spend Categories' checkbox under the Mappings section.
• If your company is NOT integrated with an ERP, you can still add Custom Fields and Spend Categories for transactional context.  
• You can add more categories (e.g., parking, fun activities, etc. ) with the same group type (refer to # 6). 

5. The 'Add Spend Categories' button allows you to view the categories already added and to add new ones. You can configure their properties on the main page. 

6. You can add a 'customized' category by clicking the 'Add a single spend category +' button. The newly added spend category must be based on an existing category type. You can specify the name, budgets affected, receipt/memo requirements, and the relevant custom fields.  

Note: Mesh provides a default mapping between Spend Categories and Budget Types (see examples below). 

• On-demand (General Purposes) cards include all spend categories.
• Subscription cards include software & subscription categories, as well as advertising.
• Travel cards include travel spend categories.

You can modify this mapping by clicking the View category icon.

In other words, the following selection indicates that the chosen Spend Category will exclusively apply to transactions made with General Purpose cards/budgets and not with any other cards/budgets (e.g., Subscription).

The setup also provides an option to add attendees to a submitted expense. 

7. You can set the Spend Categories at the card level. You may do that per card or in bulk. 

7a. For a single card, navigate to Cards & Budgets, click on the Virtual Cards link, and then click on the three dots to edit the card, where you will be able, among other things, to set the Spend Category.

7b. In bulk, navigate to Cards & Budgets, click on the Virtual Cards link, search for your subscription cards or utility cards, mark/check the mentioned cards in the cards table, and use the Bulk edit Spend Categories option located in the upper right corner when the three dots are clicked, to set the spend category.

8. You can also set the spend categories on a transaction level. Navigate to the Transactions page, click on a transaction, and set the Spend Category. 

Note: The related custom fields will be added immediately, using the stars icon to denote automation.  This expedites reconciliation activities done by power users on the Transactions or  Accounting pages before syncing transactions to the ERP.

Notes:

• Although creating the relevant coding scheme early in the process is beneficial, it is possible to alter the selections made at the card/budget and transaction levels in case of errors or changes.
• The Spend Category functionality is particularly relevant for General Purposecards, where customers set up a spending purpose, and the card is used to pay for expenses with various merchants. Mesh offers a Merchant rule feature that can be used with Subscription cards.
• Click the link to learn more about the places where users with an Employe profile can select spend categories.