Amex corporate card reconciliation, from charge to close
Reconciliation is the work between the charge and the ledger entry. On a corporate card programme it is rarely one task. It is six, and they belong to different people who are rarely in the same room at the same time.
This guide walks the full path a single Amex charge takes, from the moment a cardholder taps to the moment finance closes the period. If you are evaluating tools, it is also a checklist: any system worth adopting has to carry a charge through every stage below, not just the first one.
Stage 1 — The charge posts
A cardholder buys something. Between one and seven days later the charge settles and appears on the account. Pre-authorisations do not appear until they settle, which is why a hotel booked on the 30th can land in the following period.
The statement line carries a merchant descriptor, an amount, a date, and the last four digits of the card. That is all. It does not carry what was bought, who it was for, which project it belongs to, or whether it was within policy. Every remaining stage exists to attach that missing context.
Stage 2 — The receipt is captured
The receipt is the only document that says what actually happened. It carries the line items, the VAT rate, the supplier’s tax number, and enough detail to establish business purpose.
Capture fails for boring reasons. The receipt is a paper slip in a coat pocket. It arrived as a PDF in a personal inbox. It was handed to a colleague. The practical fix is to make capture possible at the moment of spend — a photo from a phone, a forwarded email, a drag-and-drop — rather than a monthly retrieval exercise. A receipt captured within a day of the charge is captured. A receipt requested three weeks later is negotiated.
Stage 3 — Receipt and charge are matched
A statement line and a receipt image are two separate records. Someone or something has to assert they are the same transaction, on the evidence of merchant, amount, date, and currency.
Matching is where volume hurts. Twenty charges a month is a coffee break. Four hundred charges across fifteen cardholders is a week. It is also where the errors are quietest: a receipt matched to the wrong charge produces a tidy-looking file that is wrong in two places at once, and nothing in the ledger flags it.
Two details make matching harder than it looks. Merchant descriptors on the statement often bear little resemblance to the trading name on the receipt. And foreign-currency charges have two amounts — what the merchant billed and what the card company billed after conversion — so an exact-amount match will simply fail. We cover that case separately in reconciling foreign-currency card charges.
Stage 4 — The charge is explained and coded
The cardholder is the only person who knows why the spend happened. That knowledge has a short half-life; by month-end a €54 lunch is genuinely hard to reconstruct.
What finance needs is small: a cost centre, a project or client reference, and one line of business purpose. “Client lunch with Acme — Q3 renewal prep” is enough. It is enough for the ledger, and it is enough for an auditor asking why the company paid for lunch.
Stage 5 — Approval
Most finance policies require sign-off before posting: a manager above a threshold, a department head for their team, or finance for everything. The approval itself is quick. The queue is not.
Approval also decides outcomes beyond yes and no. A charge can be sent back for a better explanation, or billed back to the employee if it was personal. Both need to be recorded against the transaction, because both change what the ledger entry should say.
Stage 6 — Export and close
Approved charges become ledger entries. In practice this is either a direct push to the accounting system or a reviewed export file, followed by a period close that freezes the range so late edits cannot silently change a filed period.
Closing is also the moment the gaps become visible: charges with no receipt, receipts with no charge, and anything still sitting in an approval queue. A close that reports those three numbers is a close you can defend.
What auditable actually means
At audit, “we reconciled it” is a claim, and the claim needs evidence. For each charge that usually means four things: the statement line, the matching receipt, the business-purpose explanation, and a record of who approved it and when.
Retention matters as much as completeness. Dutch businesses must keep their administration for seven years, and ten years for records relating to immovable property. A receipt that exists today but is gone in year four does not satisfy that obligation — which is why storage, not just capture, belongs in the evaluation.
Where the time actually goes
Teams tend to assume the cost is in stage 6. It is almost never in stage 6. The hours go to stage 2 and stage 3 — chasing documents that already exist somewhere, and matching them once they arrive. Those are also the two stages that scale worst with headcount, because each new cardholder adds both more receipts to chase and more people to chase.
That is the shape of the problem Rexa is built around: capture the receipt when the charge is fresh, match it automatically where the evidence is unambiguous, flag it for a human where it is not, route what policy says needs routing, and keep the whole chain in one place so the close is a report rather than an investigation.
General information, not tax or legal advice. Retention periods and documentation requirements vary by jurisdiction and by circumstance — confirm your obligations with your accountant.
American Express and Amex are trademarks of American Express Company. Rexa is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or in partnership with American Express.