When you own a small business, banking and expense management go hand-in-hand, because you need to know exactly where your hard-earned cash is going. If your bank and expense tools aren’t connected, your month-end turns into a scavenger hunt: chasing receipts, categorizing expenses, and trying to piece together where your team spent money and why.
As a business owner, your checklist at the end of the month can seem never ending:
☑️ Gather all your statements, payments, and receipts
⬜ Ask Sarah and Cam to submit their missing receipts again
⬜ Figure out what that weird charge on your card was actually for
⬜ Answer all your bookkeeper’s questions
What if your banking platform could handle all of this—so you never have to chase down receipts or manually categorize expenses again?
With Expense Management in Relay, your bank account isn’t just where your money sits—it’s where your entire team’s spending is:
✅ captured (and matched with a receipt)
✅ automatically categorized (by AI and your own custom rules)
✅ synced with your accounting software (Xero or Quickbooks Online).
All this comes together into a huge win for you (and your bookkeeper!). You both have to do less admin and data-entry, and yet you get meticulously detailed, audit-ready, and crystal-clear financial records.
The magic starts with the Expenses page in your Relay account.
This is where Relay pulls in every single expense across your business—all card purchases and outgoing payments (including ACH, wires, and checks).
Now you can make sure every cent is accounted for. Here’s how:
Relay chases receipts—so you don’t have to
With Relay’s built-in receipt policy and reminders, you’ll never have to worry about pinging your team to submit their receipts. Whenever an employee buys something on a Relay card that matches your receipt collection policy, they get an instant text or email reminder to submit the receipt.
For non-card transactions or digital invoices, you can forward receipts to your dedicated receipt email address. Relay automatically matches it to the correct transaction—no manual work needed.
Still missing receipts, even after all that? No problem. With a couple of clicks, you can bulk-send a friendly nudge about all outstanding receipts. Each cardholder will get nudged by Relay to submit each missing receipt.
Once you’ve got all receipts in—cue Relay’s improved receipt inbox. Match receipts to transactions instantly. Filter and search with ease. And say “no thanks, never again” to that graveyard of crumpled paper at the bottom of your work bag.
Scrupulously categorize your expenses down to every dollar and detail
When you first started your business, you were probably making most of the purchases yourself and you knew all the projects and vendors.
Now, your business has grown and you’ve got amazing team members who are trying to get their jobs done. You want to empower your team to do and spend what they need to, but you don’t want to lose your insight into where the money’s going.
So you find yourself trying to make sense of expenses after the fact. Deciphering receipts. Trying to figure out how much was spent in which category this month. This lack of clarity makes it hard to make decisions about what’s right for your business.
With Relay’s Expense Management, this complex process becomes something you can do in a few clicks on a single page, right within your banking platform.
How it Works
Start by integrating Xero or Quickbooks Online and importing your chart of accounts. Follow the guided set up process in your account. This usually takes under 10 minutes.
Now you’re ready to review and reconcile your spending for the month:
All your transactions appear in the Expenses section of your Relay account
Your team has already uploaded receipts, which have been matched to each transaction
Relay AI will automatically detect and input the GL code for each transaction
Set up custom accounting rules to automate the rest of the categorization
Review your transactions. Most of the data-entry will already be done, but you can make nuanced changes, such as splitting up a single receipt into multiple categories
Hit the Sync button. Your expenses, now neatly categorized, will flow from Relay into your accounting software
That’s how Relay helps you complete your month-end reconciliation in a fraction of the time. Ready to deep dive? Let’s go!
Integrate your accounting software
Relay’s two-way integration with QuickBooks Online and Xero means that you can import the accounting fields (think expense categories, vendors, and GL codes) that are relevant to your month-end reconciliation workflow.
This allows you to categorize your expenses in Relay, where you’ve already got all the context handy, and then sync with your accounting system. No more switching back and forth between programs. Relay becomes the command center at the heart of your financial workflow. Plus this integration ensures your accounting books stay audit-ready at all times. With all transactions accurately categorized and up-to-date, you can confidently hand over your financial records when it’s time for an audit, knowing everything is in order.
Split one receipt into multiple categories
Business spending isn’t always neatly categorized. That $317.93 Target receipt? It could include a new monitor, lunch for the team, and office supplies—all of which need to be categorized separately in your books.
With Relay’s split transaction feature, you can easily break down a single purchase into multiple expense categories. That means:
🧾$199.95 → Tech & Equipment
🧾 $72.10 → Meals & Entertainment
🧾 $45.88 → Office Supplies
This gives you a granular and unparalleled level of detail to ensure that every dollar is accounted for correctly.
Introducing AI-powered and automated expense categorization
Relay’s first AI-powered feature takes the manual work out of expense tracking by automatically detecting and assigning GL codes to every transaction.
In addition to AI categorization, you can set your own accounting rules to capture any nuances that are specific to your business.
For example, you can set a custom accounting rule to:
Always categorize Amazon purchases as "Office Supplies"
Automatically assign recurring software subscriptions to "Marketing”
Ensure any transaction from a certain vendor or under a certain amount gets categorized exactly the way you want
Relay’s AI-powered categorization saves you time, while custom accounting rules give you full control—so reconciliation is both faster and more accurate than ever.
😍 Mood when you unlock Expense Management with Relay
With Relay’s Expense Management, your banking and expense tracking work as one—giving you instant clarity on where your money is going while eliminating the tedious tasks that slow you down.
Ready to shorten that end of month to-do list? Let Relay help. Head to the Expenses tab in your Relay account.
