Patent ID: 8498909

Claim:
An expense reporting system for viewing and manipulating a user's financial transaction data from a cash transaction, comprising: a user interface unit having user input means and a display, the user interface unit being configured for communicating with a processor connected to a data storage unit, the data storage unit storing a user's financial transaction data and being accessible over a network by a remote user on the user interface unit; an expense reporting module having a graphical user interface (GUI), the expense reporting module comprising: a transaction retrieval component operable to access the user's financial transaction data and generate representations thereof viewable by a user on the user interface unit display; a category generation engine operable to generate user-defined project category data and representations thereof viewable to a user on the user interface unit display; a code generation component operable to generate a user-defined code identifier; a code association component operable to link the user-defined project category data and representations thereof with the user-defined code identifier; a transaction categorization engine operable to associate a percentage or portion of selected ones of the user's financial transaction data representations with one or more of the user-defined project category data representations, the transaction categorization engine being further operable to automatically associate the user-defined project category data linked to the user-defined code identifier with the user's financial transaction data; a GUI generation engine operable to express a graphical arrangement of the selected ones of the user's financial transaction representations associated with the one or more user-defined project category data representations on the user interface unit display; a data record generation engine operable to convert the graphical arrangement into a data record, wherein the data record is in a form suitable for at least one of review, storage, modifications, analysis or exportation; and a data record manipulation component operable to at least enable the user to manually designate a fraction of a single transaction to be associated or disassociated with a selected one of the user-defined project category data representations.