Set a budget's limit to $0 so a payment needs an approved top-up request first; see Understanding Budget Owners in Approval Rules for how approval routing works.
Before you start
- You'll need permission to manage the budget's settings (limit, per-member limits, and Approval Rules), or already hold Budget Owner, approver, or Admin/Owner rights.
Steps
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Set the budget's limit to $0.
- For the whole budget: leave it as a standard budget and set the overall limit to $0, either through Edit Budget Rules (applies from the next reset) or a one-off limit adjustment (applies immediately, for the current period only).
- For specific people only: turn on Set a Limit on Each Person (under Spend Limit and Top-up Rules) and set just their limit to $0 in the Budget Members table instead, leaving everyone else's limit as is. Once this is on, the budget stops accepting top-up requests at the budget level, so don't combine it with a shared $0 limit; each person tops up against their own limit instead.
- Either way, $0 is an enforced ceiling, not just a display figure: every card swipe or bill payment against that budget, or that person, is checked against the remaining amount before it's allowed to go through.
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Assign at least one Budget Owner to the budget.
The Budget Top-ups Approval Rule routes requests to the budget's Budget Owner(s) by default. If none is assigned, the request falls back to the account's Owner, or the oldest Admin if there's no Owner.- On Premium and Enterprise plans, route the rule to a specific person or role instead, for example a particular finance approver, regardless of who owns the budget. There's always a fallback rule, so a request is never left without a possible approver.
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Turn on Prevent Self-Approval for the Budget Top-ups Approval Rule and set a delegate for every approver.
Prevent Self-Approval is on by default. If the resolved approver is also the requester, most often a Budget Owner requesting a top-up on their own budget, Weel doesn't auto-approve it: it redirects to that approver's configured Approval Delegate instead.- This is easy to miss when you're setting up pre-approval for a budget you own yourself: your request won't just sit waiting for you, and it won't silently go through either, it'll go to your delegate.
- Make sure every relevant approver, especially any Budget Owner who might end up requesting a top-up against their own budget, has a sensible delegate set, or their requests will land with someone who isn't expecting them.
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Add everyone who needs pre-approval as a member of the budget.
Only a budget member, or someone who already has budget-editing rights such as a Budget Owner, approver, or Admin/Owner, can submit a top-up request against it. -
Have the team member request a top-up once they hit the $0 limit.
They can request it from the mobile app (Approvals > + > Top-up), or from their own row in the budget's Budget Members table on the web app if their business has the newer web top-up experience turned on.- The request carries only a plain-text reason. There's no way to attach a quote, invoice, or other file, so share supporting documents separately, by email for instance, if the approver needs them.
What happens next
Approving a top-up only raises the budget's limit; it doesn't move money. The payment still needs enough in the business's Account Balance to clear, so an approved top-up can still fail afterwards for insufficient account funds (a separate failure that notifies the Admin, not the cardholder). Requests also don't expire automatically, so make sure a delegate or backup approver is always available, or a payment can stay blocked indefinitely.