Budgets give you control over how you separate your funds and manage your team members' access to spend from those funds. Money in budgets is kept separately from your main balances.
As a business owner or admin, you can use budgets for anything that you’d like to separate funds and manage team expenses for. If you create a budget, you can and add employees to order cards and spend from the budget.
You can use budgets to:
separate expenses for teams in your company
create a pool of money for an event for your team to spend from
separate money to pay specific suppliers
manage controls and permissions for members to spend from specific budgets
This feature is currently in a trial period - we’re working on bringing it to all of our business customers soon.
How is a budget different from a main currency Balances or Jars?
By default, money that you’ve added to your business accounts are held in balances, separated by currencies. You have one balance per currency. All team members added to your business account with an “employee” role can order cards and spend from the main currency balance.
Jars is where business owners and admins can set aside money for specific purposes. It’s kept separate from the balance of that currency. Team members can't spend from Jars.
Budgets is where business owners and admins can separate funds and manage team expenses. As an admin, you can create multiple budgets in the same currencies e.g "Marketing in GBP", "HR in EUR". You can add team members with employee role to budgets, so they can order cards and spend from specific budgets.
Who can access budgets?
Only customers with admin and employee roles can access Budgets. For more details on multi-user access, see this article.
Admins can do the following:
create budgets
add money to budgets
withdraw money from budgets to the balance of the same currency
add members to a budgets
order digital cards from a budgets
spend money, using digital cards tagged to budgets
view transactions made by all members within all budgets
remove members from budgets to block their spending
manage their own cards (freeze, unfreeze, get card details)
edit names of existing budgets
close existing budgets
Employees who have been added to budgets by admins can do the following:
view budget balances
order digital cards for the budget they’ve been added to
spend money using digital cards tagged to the budget they’ve been added to
view all of their transactions made within the budget
manage their own cards (freeze, unfreeze, get card details)
How can I open a budget?
Only team members with owner and admin roles can open budgets.
As an admin, you can open a budget by:
logging in to Wise and clicking on "Open 50+ currencies" on the homepage. You'll see the option to open a Balance, Budget or Jar
click on "Budget" and provide the name of the budget - usually what your team would use it for, and the currency which you’d like to use the budget in.
You can also export statements for specific budgets if you need to.
How can team members be added to budgets?
Team members must be added to the company’s business account with an employee role, before they can be added to budgets.
Learn more about assigning roles to team members
Learn more about how you can add or remove team members from your business account
How can I add and withdraw money from budgets?
Admins can add money to a budget by moving money from the business account’s existing balances. You can add money from a balance of the same currency to a budget of the same currency for free. (E.g moving money from GBP balance to Marketing GBP budget.)
If you add money from a balance, to a budget of a different currency, the usual conversion fee will apply.
To withdraw money from budgets, you can only move money to the main currency balance — it’s free to do so.
How many cards can employees order for each budget?
Each user with employee role can order up to three digital cards across all budgets. This means that everyone can only have a maximum of three digital cards across all budgets.
(To get digital cards under new budgets which have been created, you’d need to delete any digital cards you may not need to use anymore.)
How do spending limits apply within a budget?
Spending limits apply on a user level, not a card or budget level. When an admin invites a team member to join the company’s business account as an employee, they set the spending limit for the team member.
This limit applies to the employee across all cards they have. Currently, it’s not possible to set spending limits on a card or budget level. If you’re an admin and would like to change an employee’s spending limits, you can do so on the Team page.
How can I see all the cards linked to a budget?
If you’re a business owner or admin, you’d be able to see all cards linked to a budget under the “cards” tab.
If you’re an employee, you can only see your own cards in each budget or an overview of all your cards with the corresponding budget name in the main card page. You cannot see the card details of your other team members.
What happens when a team member leaves the company?
When a team member leaves the company, the business account owner or admin can remove them from the business account. By doing so, the team member (whether they are an admin or employee) will also be removed from all budgets they were added to. All cards associated with the relevant team members will be blocked and removed from budgets and the business account.
What happens when a team member’s role is changed from an admin to an employee?
When this happens, any cards tied to any existing budgets can still be used normally. The team member will still be able to use their digital cards that are tagged to existing budgets.
However, since they are no longer an admin, they will only see their own card details and transaction details. They will no longer be able to perform the role of an admin within budget such as managing money and members within budgets.
What happens when a team member’s role is changed from an employee to an admin?
When this happens, any cards tied to any existing budgets can still be used normally. With the new admin role, the team member will now be able to perform additional roles of an admin within budgets, such as seeing all budgets for the business account, managing money and members within budgets.
Are there any instances where a team member may not be able to use a budget?
If a team member’s Wise profile is suspended by Wise for any reason, their cards will be blocked and they won’t be able to spend from your business account. If this happens, please get in touch.