What does BrightPay's API actually cover?
Bright documents a payroll API for BrightPay at devdocs.brightpay.com. The methods on record are GetEmployees and HourlyPayments — a read of the employee list and a write of hourly payments to payslips, scoped to timesheet providers. There is no documented endpoint for reimbursements, expenses or additions.
Vergo does not claim to write reimbursements into BrightPay, because BrightPay does not publish a way to do it. What Vergo does is remove the work that happens before the payroll entry.
How does Vergo handle reimbursements for BrightPay users?
Employees capture spend as it happens: photograph the receipt, pick the category and department, submit. The claim goes to the right approver automatically. Vergo enforces your policy at submission — receipt required above a threshold, category limits, who can approve what — so out-of-policy claims are caught by the system rather than by an argument at month end.
At your reimbursement cut-off, Vergo produces the approved claim list for the period: one line per employee per claim, coded, with receipts attached and the approver named. Payroll enters the reimbursement amounts into the BrightPay run from a reviewed list instead of a folder of photographs.
Why does this matter for a small employer?
BrightPay's typical customer is an SMB or a bureau running payroll for many small employers. In both cases the person doing payroll is doing several other jobs. Expense claims are the classic time sink: individually trivial, collectively an afternoon, and impossible to reconstruct months later when someone asks what a £340 payment was for.
Putting capture on the employee's phone and approval on their manager means the payroll job shrinks to review and entry. And because every claim keeps its receipt, the record survives long after the memory of the spend does.
What does the audit trail look like?
Each claim carries who spent, when, how much, what for, which category and department it was coded to, who approved it and when, and the receipt image. That record does not change after the fact, and it is searchable — which is the difference between answering an inspector's question in a minute and spending a day on it.
What about mileage?
Mileage claims are calculated from the journey at the rate you configure, so the figure that reaches payroll is derived rather than asserted. The same approval and receipt rules apply to everything else — subsistence, parking, small purchases, subscriptions bought on a personal card.
How do we start?
Invite employees, mirror your approval structure, and map expense categories and departments to match the values your BrightPay entries use. Employees can submit claims from the first day; the first clean reimbursement batch lands on your next scheduled pay run.
Does BrightPay have a payroll API?
Yes, a documented v1.0 API with GetEmployees and HourlyPayments methods, scoped to timesheet providers. It has no reimbursement or additions endpoint.
Does Vergo write reimbursements into BrightPay?
No. Vergo prepares an approved, coded and receipted claim list for each period; payroll enters the reimbursement amounts into the BrightPay run.
What stops duplicate claims?
Each claim has a single state visible to employee, approver and payroll, and paid claims are marked as such, so the same receipt cannot be submitted twice unnoticed.
Can a bureau use this across several clients?
Yes. Each employer's employees, approvers, categories and policy are configured separately, and each produces its own per-period claim list.
