Controlling the Chaos: Putting Business Rules in the Database

Presentation Summary

Christine Ray, Indiana University

Business rules for organizing data in a Balance Sheet, Income Statement or a Cash Flow Statement may be put into a central location, database, or into each and every report. It makes sense to put the rules into the database instead of repeating the rules, sometimes in many different reporting languages, throughout the multiple reports. With an ETL tool you can take the simple rules and expand them to add the necessary classifications and sort orders to the General Ledger Balance and/or Detail tables. Putting the rules in the database will allow a report writer to write many different styles of each statement without having to duplicate the rules. I will show how rules can be implemented in the database, expanded to the GL and/or detail tables and used in a data dump or reporting environment. We have a variety of report needs within each financial statement and having the rules in the database allows for a single location updating. A short demo of the resulting financial statements will be shown using BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tool). BIRT is an open source software project providing reporting and business intelligence capabilities.