This week’s episode ties together the “Requirements are in the Data”  and “Show me the Money”  videos with the structure and nature of rules, and how those have to be developed.

The intersection of business rules and the transactional data is critical to understand to develop and test them appropriately.  Accounting and extract rules are accessed by the values provided in the transactional data.  It is possible to create all sorts of rules which never occur in the transactional data.  These rules will never be executed, and thus are useless.

The opposite is also possible: many transactions that have no applicable rules. If one is creating an extract for a very specific purpose, this might be appropriate.  But for accounting rules doing so probably means that a lot of transactional data ends up suspended or rejected.

The development of the rules and then the testing will be highly influenced by the transactional data used in those processes–which may or may not match well what is ultimately used in production.

This is Episode 175 of Conversations with Kip, the best financial system vlog there is. Literally learn more–about ledgers and financial systems–at LedgerLearning.com.  

Last week’s entry: Business Rules vs. Reference Data.

Next week’s entry: Business Rules & ERP Integration