Spending Categories
You can use the Spending Monitor to allow or prevent purchases at entire categories of merchants. You can still allow purchases from individual merchants within a given category using Merchant settings.
In this article, you’ll learn how to block or allow transactions based on Spending categories.
Spending categories overview
If you would like to block all purchases at merchants in a given spending category, take the following steps:
- Through your administrator dashboard, go to the “Spending Monitor” tab and scroll down to the “Spending categories” section.
- Review the Spending categories provided, and click the toggle to change the setting from “ALLOW” to “BLOCK.”
If you would like to block transactions within a given category but still allow cardholders to make purchases at specific merchants within that category, you can use the Merchant settings feature.
For example, if you want to block purchases made at beauty salons, spas, and barber shops but allow transactions at the specific salon the cardholder visits regularly, you can:
- Block “Beauty” on the list of Spending categories.
- Add the specific salon to the Merchant settings, and click “always allow.”
You can view additional information about the Spending categories by hovering your cursor over the blue “Detail” next to the category.
Additional information
Spending categories are determined by merchant category codes (MCC), a classification assigned by Visa to every business that allows financial institutions to categorize purchases. True Link cannot change the categorization of individual merchants.
Note that Spending Monitor settings are applied at the merchant level, and it is not possible to block specific purchases at a given merchant. For more information, see our article on managing merchandise purchases at a merchant.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact our Customer Support team.