Purpose
This document explains how to use the Employee Directory to add and edit employees in TravelBank.
Audience
This article is directed toward Commercial Rewards Card program administrators with a free TravelBank expense and management account.
Overview
When adding employees for your organization, you can add them individually or in bulk. This article describes how to do both.
To complete the tasks described in this article, navigate to the Employees page:
From the left navigation menu, select Company Settings then Employees > Employee Directory.
Note: When adding employees for your organization, you can add them individually or in bulk.
Also note that “General” is the default department assigned to each employee. To add additional departments and assign employees to multiple departments, you must upgrade your account to a paid account. Once you upgrade your account, you can add employees to up to 20 departments.
Add employees individually
To add employees individually, take the following steps:
Select Add Employee in the top-right corner to the right of the search bar. This brings up an Add Employee dialog.
Enter the employee’s information.
Select Send Invite to add the employee.
Invite employees
If you have already added employees to your organization during the Commercial Rewards Card program application process, you still need to “invite” them to join. To invite an employee that you have already added to your organization, take the following steps:
Locate the employee record for the employee you want to invite, then select the blue pencil icon at the far-right of the row (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Edit icon to make changes to an existing employee record
This brings up a dialog with the employee’s information.
Select Send invite. You can also choose Save for Later if your employee's email inbox is not yet set up, or if you want to wait until you've added all the employees before sending out invites. We recommend using Save for Later until you have fully configured your site and are ready for users to access TravelBank.
Note: If an invite has already been sent to an employee, the invite button text shows as “Resend invite”.
Complete a bulk import of employees
To get started with importing a list of employees for your organization, download the TravelBank employee .csv template. We recommend keeping a local copy of this file, and then adding and removing employees from it. Then later when you import the file, you can streamline the process, implementing several changes with fewer steps.
As a Commercial Rewards Card customer, you have one default department, travel policy, and expense policy, so you can leave those columns empty, as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Example .csv file of employee information
“General” is the default Primary Department assigned to each employee. To add additional departments and assign employees to multiple departments, upgrade your account.
Note: The .csv template includes columns related to employee roles. Review our roles and permissions article for information on user roles.
Import employees
Review the “Importing users through CSV” article for instructions on this task.
Figure 3 is an example of how the .csv file information uploads to TravelBank.
Figure 3. Example of employee records uploaded from the .csv template
Remove employees
If you need to remove employees that are already in TravelBank's system, remove them from your .csv file before you upload it, and check the "Deactivate Excluded Users” checkbox. Once you upload your file, the Employee Directory prompts you with the changes read from the file. You can choose to accept the changes, or you can cancel them if you need to modify your .csv file before you complete your import.
Remove an individual employee
To remove an individual employee in the TravelBank system, take the following steps:
From the navigation menu, select Company Settings > Employees > Employee Directory.
Locate the employee record for the employee you want to remove, then select the blue pencil icon at the far-right of the row. This brings up a dialog with the employee’s information.
Select “Terminate”. This brings up a confirmation message.
Select “Terminate” again to confirm your selection.
“Block Automatically Joining” field
The “Block Automatically Joining” (Figure 4) field allows you to manage whether users within your organization can automatically join the organization when they sign up for a TravelBank account using the email address with your organization’s domain.
Figure 4. "Block Automatically Joining" field
| When the setting is turned off: The employee is not blocked from automatically joining and can join your organization (that is, be added to the list of employees on your Employees page) by signing up at TravelBank.com. |
| When the setting is turned on: The employee is blocked from automatically joining, and when the user goes through the sign-up flow, the following error message appears (Figure 5). |
Figure 5. "Block Automatically Joining" field error message
Edit an employee record
To make changes to an existing employee record, locate the employee record you want to change, then select the blue pencil icon at the far-right of the row (Figure 1). This brings up a dialog with several fields of information related to the employee.
Note: If you need to update multiple employees' email addresses, you can do so using a .csv import, as described in the “Import employees” section of this article. If you only need to correct an individual email address, contact support. Provide the email address as it is, and then what it should be; support will contact you once the process has been completed.
Add an employee to multiple departments (paid TravelBank feature)
General is the default department assigned. You can edit this and (with a paid TravelBank account) add the employee to one or more departments (up to 20), by checking the box next to the department in the dropdown menu (Figure 6).
Figure 6. Department assignments checklist
Assign a manager to an employee
Before you can assign a manager to an employee in the Edit Employee dialog, the manager must accept the invitation to TravelBank. Once the manager accepts the invitation, you can assign the employee to the manager by typing the manager’s name into the “Manager” search field, as shown in the following Figure 7.
Figure 7. Edit Employee dialog
Assign Admin or Finance privileges
To assign Admin or Finance privileges, choose the options in the Advanced Permissions field.
Note: The Finance Approver for Entire Organization checkbox and Finance Approver Departments dropdown menu appear only when Finance is added in the Advanced Permissions field.
Figure 8. Finance Approver for Entire Organization checkbox and Finance Approver Departments dropdown field
Assign an employee a Primary Department
If (with a paid TravelBank account) you assign an employee to multiple departments, assigning them to a "Primary Department" will make it so that whenever they create a new expense, the department will default to what is set as their primary department.
Note: If (with a paid TravelBank account) you assign more than 20 departments to an employee, the following error message appears:
Figure 9. Review CSV Import error message
Save the employee record with changes
When you’ve finished making any needed changes to the employee’s information, select “Save” in the lower-right corner of the window.
Frequently asked questions
Questions?
Chat with us in the app or email commercialrewards@travelbank.com
Publish date: January 17, 2025
Last update: July 25, 2025