Automated expense reports systems and methods

A method for managing automatic generation of expense reports using a computer system, the method comprising:

• generating, by the computer system, a user interface configured to receive schedule information the schedule information including a company-wide schedule associated with a plurality of users specifying a trigger date and at least one reminder;
• storing, by the computer system, the schedule information in a data store;
• generating, by the computer system, on the expense report generation date, a plurality of expense reports respectively corresponding to the plurality of users;
• limiting, by the computer system, entry of expenses in a user interface for a plurality of expense reports to those expenses that have a transaction date that precedes the trigger date by at least a buffer time period, wherein the user interface is configured to evaluate an input received and deny the input responsive to failing buffer period validation;
• identifying, by a receipt parsing component, a string of characters in received text generated by optical character recognition (OCR) executed on a receipt that matches a character pattern specified by at least one regular expression of a plurality of regular expressions, wherein the at least one regular expression includes metacharacters;
• accessing, by the receipt parsing component, a plurality of regular expressions associated with a plurality of vendor elements;
• capturing, by the receipt parsing component, a value of a vendor element from the received text, wherein the value of the vendor element comprises the string of characters that match the character pattern;
• accessing, by the receipt parsing component, reference data specifying additional elements associated with the value of the vendor element and information to identify values of the additional elements;
• capturing, by the receipt parsing component, the values of the additional elements in the text based on the reference data, wherein capturing the values of the additional elements includes:
• searching the text for regular expressions associated with the additional elements;
• and
• locating the values of the additional elements using receipt format information associated with the additional elements that specifies locations for the values relative to the regular expressions;
• automatically assign a category for a transaction described by the receipt and received OCR text using at least one of the value of the vendor element and at least one values of the additional elements;
• and
• inputting automatically, by the computer system, the value of the vendor element, the values of the additional elements, and the category in a data store responsive to buffer period validation.