Expense report management methods and apparatus

An expense management method comprising:

• receiving, in a secure transaction server from a financial entity, a defined account data subset of account data related to a financial transaction of a user, the defined account data subset including an account identifier;
• receiving, in the secure transaction server from the financial entity, a defined transaction data subset of transaction data of the financial transaction, the defined transaction data subset including a transaction identifier, a description of the financial transaction, a merchant name, an amount, and a post date;
• creating, via the secure transaction server, an expense object that includes the defined account data subset and the defined transaction data subset;
• displaying, via the secure transaction server, information from the expense object within a graphical user interface in conjunction with information from other expense objects related to the user, each of the other expense objects including a respective defined account data subset and a respective defined transaction data subset;
• receiving, in the secure transaction server, a selection from the user that only the expense object among the plurality of expense objects is to be added to an expense report;
• responsive to receiving the selection, creating, via the secure transaction server, the expense report that includes the expense object and excludes the other of the expense objects such that a third-party will not receive the other of the expense objects;
• and
• transmitting from the secure transaction server the expense report for expense reimbursement related to the user.

A non-transitory machine-accessible device having instructions stored thereon that are configured when executed to cause a machine to at least:

• receive a message from an application indicative that a user has begun a session related to an expense report;
• transmit an identifier of the user to a plurality of financial entities that have accounts related to the user;
• selectively receive, from the plurality of financial entities, (i) defined account data subsets of account data related to financial transactions of the user, and (ii) defined transaction data subsets of transaction data of the financial transactions;
• create an expense object for each for each of defined account data subsets and the corresponding defined transaction data subsets;
• cause the application to display information from the expense objects within a graphical user interface;
• receive an expense message from the application indicative of a selection of one of the expense objects;
• responsive to receiving the expense message,
• (i) update a method parameter of the selected expense object to indicate an association with the expense report, and
• (ii) store the expense object to a file within a memory;
• responsive to determining that the session has ended, discard the expense objects that were not selected to be included within the expense report to selectively exclude the discarded expense objects from being accessible by a third-party;
• and
• responsive to receiving a submit message from the application, transmit the expense report including the selected expense object to a server of a specified third-party for expense reimbursement.