FAQ: The Expense Lifecycle

How do reimbursements with Abacus work?

Expenses are reimbursed via ACH (Automated Clearing House) transfer. The full lifecycle of a debit and credit can take up to 8 business days.

Once an expense is approved by an admin, the reimbursement process is automatically triggered. At the end of each day, Abacus makes a batch withdrawal (debit) on the company bank account for the sum of all approved expenses from that day. This sum is transferred into an escrow account and can take up to 6 business days to fully settle.

Once settled, the funds are automatically transferred (credited) into the bank accounts of the employees who submitted the corresponding expenses. If an employee has more than one expense approved on the same day, he or she will receive one payment for the sum of those approved expenses. The transfer to the employee’s bank account takes 1-2 business days.

Variability in reimbursement turnaround time

For the first few reimbursement cycles, we will aim to build up the reputation score of the organization by waiting for the withdrawal on the company bank account to fully settle in the escrow account before issuing payments to employees. This is to ensure that the withdrawal completes successfully. Occasionally a withdrawal will fail due to insufficient funds or a change in the company’s bank account information. To mitigate the risk of a failed debit, we’ll wait for the full debit/credit cycle to complete.

As withdrawals are successfully completed, your company will build a good standing reputation with Abacus, and we will be able to speed up the reimbursement processing. Our goal is to get processing times down to 2-3 business days for our customers.