New: Customize Ancillary Benefits with Navan’s New Expense Feature
Samantha Shankman
•26 Sep 2023•
The pace of innovation at Navan is unmatched: The expense team recently released 10 features in 10 days to help solve some of the most challenging pain points in the expense process.
One of those — Custom Benefit Policies — deserves a closer look into how it supports finance leaders by automating their processes without sacrificing visibility or control.
This latest feature aligns with Navan’s “set it and forget it” approach to spend management, which empowers finance professionals to streamline operations with technology so they can focus on more strategic tasks.
How to Customize Benefits with Navan Expense
The Custom Benefit Policies feature empowers finance leaders to craft specific, unique benefits policies with the same visibility and control as Navan Expense’s standard benefits policies.
Standard benefits already programmed into Navan include meals, wellness, phone, and work-from-home stipends. But companies sometimes have other benefit expense types that don’t fall within these preexisting categories. For example, Navan customers have created custom benefit policies for milestone celebrations and monthly meetups, which cover virtual and in-person meals or activities with teammates.
The new feature enables admins to create, edit, disable, and delete these custom benefits policies. Admins can also rename and edit the descriptions of existing standard benefits to better suit their company’s needs.
Why We Built It
We are constantly in conversation with our current and prospective customers to understand their policies, programs, and processes so we can adapt our product to best suit their needs.
And those customers tell us that a big priority is having control and visibility over company spend.
Without custom benefit policies, transactions for the expenses listed above would occur off the Navan platform, and employees had to label these transactions as “other.” Expense admins not only had to recode the transactions to the right GLs manually but also could not implement policy limits and engage in complex workarounds, like using expense categories for multiple expenses.
With custom benefit policies, control and visibility applied to standard policies extend to unique benefits. Now, organizations can grow their company culture by creating — and managing — benefits that provide the best experience for their team members without sacrificing guardrails and oversight.
Explore the 10 latest feature updates to Navan Expense.