Already Using Prepaid Expense Cards? How to Match Every Employee Charge to a Receipt

This guide is for the owner, office manager or finance admin who already runs a card program and spends the end of every month chasing receipts. It covers what to check with your card provider, the one-time setup, and the routine that follows.

What your card program does, and what the receipt routine does

A prepaid card program and a receipt routine solve different problems. Mixing them up is why many admins think they need to switch card providers to fix a paperwork problem.

In short: the card program controls the money, and ExpenseBot documents where it went. ExpenseBot is an expense tracker that matches the charges on a company's existing cards, including prepaid card programs, to the receipts in each cardholder's own Google Sheet. It does not issue, load or set limits on cards, and it does not decline purchases. Whether you call it a prepaid card, a company card or an employee expense card, the receipt routine is the same.

Before you start: will your card program's transactions reach ExpenseBot?

Every card program falls into one of three cases.

1. The issuer connects through Plaid and shares employee cards. Use Plaid mode. One company connection brings in the accounts and the cardholders the issuer names.
2. It connects, but shares only the parent account or leaves some activity unnamed. Those rows appear as Cardholder not identified by bank, with the account and its last four digits. They may include the owner's own card, so assign them only after you confirm who should review them. ExpenseBot never guesses ownership.
3. It doesn't connect. Choose Upload statements (manual) and upload one statement per person, as a PDF, a photo (JPG or PNG), CSV, OFX or QIF. Never upload one combined company statement under a single employee.

If you're not sure which case you're in, ask your prepaid provider one question: "Can I export each cardholder's transactions separately as CSV or PDF?" If the answer is yes, uploads will always work, even when a bank connection doesn't.

One-time setup, from the admin's side

The owner opens Team from the toggle at the top of ExpenseBot; a co-admin uses Team Management in the left menu (Team on mobile). Either way you land in Team Management. Then:

1. Open Push Settings. Under Push Settings to Your Team, pick Corporate Card from Choose setting.
2. Choose Plaid (automatic) and Connect Corporate Card, or choose Upload statements (manual).
3. With Plaid, click Find accounts and employee cards. It checks the last 90 days of activity for accounts and the cardholders your bank names.
4. In the Assign to column, pick the person who holds each card. Your own card goes to You (team owner), and one person can hold several cards. Only active license holders can be picked, not pending invitations.
5. Optionally set Closes on to the card's statement closing day.
6. Click Save Assignments. Assignments stay until you change them.

Every label and edge case is in the team corporate card admin guide, and the broader case for keeping your cards is in corporate card expense tracking without switching cards. For everything else an admin can manage, see what a team admin can do.

The weekly routine: charges matched against each person's receipts

Once cards are assigned, the routine runs each week without you. ExpenseBot downloads each assigned card's charges and matches them to the receipts already in that cardholder's own ExpenseBot Google Sheet. Each cardholder gets an email listing the transactions still missing a receipt.

The cardholder adds the missing receipts in whichever way suits them: a Gmail receipt scan, a phone photo, or forwarding the email to receipts@expensebot.ai from their login or a verified forwarding address. Then they click Complete Reconciliation, which notifies you.

Staff whose receipts land in a personal inbox don't need a second account. See business receipts in personal email for the two ways to handle that.

Card or statement → assigned cardholder → weekly match → cardholder completes → period report (master sheet unchanged)

When a receipt is missing: the admin's view

Open View Team Dashboard to see the Team Reconciliation Dashboard. Each row shows the member, the card, how many charges matched, and a status: All Matched, Needs Review, Processing, Pending, Awaiting weekly run, Member completed or Submitted. Open a member to see Unmatched transactions with a count, and send an Email reminder to that person from the same panel.

The point is who does the chasing. Instead of emailing the whole team, you remind only the people the dashboard shows are still missing receipts.

Period reports without touching anyone's spreadsheet

At the end of each reporting period, ExpenseBot submits a report for every cardholder whose weeks are all complete and sends you one summary email. Cardholders with unfinished weeks are held until they finish; they are not force-submitted. If someone finishes early, you can close their period with Approve period.

The Reporting period is monthly by default, with weekly, every two weeks and quarterly as options. A card with Closes on set follows its own statement cycle instead. That setting changes when reports go out, not whether weekly matching works. Reports are sent automatically unless you turn on Require approval before reports are sent to accounting.

Each report is a snapshot of the matched rows for that period. The employee's own Google Sheet is not moved or rewritten, so they keep capturing receipts there as before. If you also reconcile cards outside the team, the credit card reconciliation page explains the individual and team models side by side.

Prepaid bookkeeping notes

These apply to any prepaid program, whatever tool you use:

• A load or top-up moves company money onto a card. It is a transfer, not an expense, and it has no receipt. The expenses are the individual purchases made with it.
• Keep each person's card activity separate. One statement per cardholder is what lets each charge be matched to the receipts of the person who made it.
• Hold on to each cardholder's statements for your records. Your accountant will want them alongside the receipts at year end.

For small teams weighing the wider setup, the small business expense tracker page shows how card reconciliation fits with receipt capture and reporting.

Frequently Asked Questions