Use of separate rib ledgers in a computerized enterprise resource planning system

• US 20050137946A1
• Filed: 12/22/2003
• Published: 06/23/2005
• Est. Priority Date: 12/22/2003
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: SAP SE
• Original Assignee: SAP AG (SAP SE)
• Inventors: Schaefer, Andreas, Schnoerer, Horst, Schaub, Thomas M.
• Granted Patent: US 7,716,092 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 705/30
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/06 Resources, workflows, human or project management; Enterprise or organisation planning; Enterprise or organisation modelling
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 40/00 Finance; Insurance; Tax strategies; Processing of corporate or income taxes
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 40/12 Accounting

Abstract

Enterprise management applications perform a “revenues increasing the budget” (RIB) operation on general ledger data and store elements of the general ledger data that have a RIB effect in another ledger, called the “RIB ledger”. RIB ledgers may include sets of RIB rules, storage for documents reflecting all relevant delta values together with the corresponding links to the underlying original transaction documents as well as storage for all relevant aggregated data. Accordingly, when audit operations are performed for RIB budget increases, relevant transaction data is readily available in the RIB ledger. Such copies of the data are more easily accessed than through a search of the larger set of general ledger data, thus facilitating and accelerating use of the RIB techniques in an online system.

Claims

1. An enterprise management system, comprising:

a transaction management system,

a transaction database to store data representing transactions accepted by the transaction management system,

a RIB rule manager executing RIB rules of a RIB ledger, and

a RIB ledger comprising a RIB rule set and a RIB database, the RIB database having objects storing data representing admitted transactions that are relevant to the RIB rules.

2. The system of claim 1, wherein the RIB database stores aggregations of relevant actual revenues, of reference revenue budget and of budgetary updates generated by the RIB rules based on admitted transactions.

3. The system of claim 1, wherein the transaction database stores data of actual revenue items already admitted, of reference revenue budget items and of budgetary updates generated therefrom pursuant to the RIB rules.

4. The system of claim 1, wherein the RIB database stores pointers to documents and to data of the transaction database with the underlying RIB relevant transaction data and documents of the original transactions being stored in the transaction database.

5. A RIB processing method, comprising:

responsive to a posted revenue transaction, determining if the revenue transaction is relevant to any RIB rule,

if so, for each RIB rule relevant to the posted revenue transaction;

reading historical data from a RIB database,

calculating an incremental budget increase pursuant to the RIB rule,

revising the historical data in the RIB database, and

storing the incremental budget value in the RIB database and in the transaction database.

6. The method of claim 5, wherein the storing of the incremental budget value is performed immediately after the calculation.

7. The method of claim 5, wherein the storing of the incremental budget value is performed pursuant to a periodic system update.

8. The method of claim 5, wherein the determining comprises:

searching across multiple sets of RIB rules of multiple RIB ledgers for rules that are relevant to the revenue item,

performing each RIB rule identified from the search, and

storing relevant data and RIB increases in RIB databases associated with the respective rules.

9. The RIB processing method of claim 5, further comprising:

storing documents of the transaction in the transaction database and

storing in the RIB database pointers to locations of the stored documents in the transaction database.

10. The RIB processing method of claim 5, wherein the processing includes comparing an aggregation of revenue with a reference revenue budget value.

11. A RIB system, comprising:

first storage to store transactions accepted by a transaction processing system,

a RIB ledger, comprising a RIB rule set and a second storage, the RIB rule set populated by RIB rules that refer to revenue items in the first storage, the second storage to store updates to aggregated values of the relevant actual revenues and of the reference revenue budget and to store incremental budget values generated from execution of the RIB rule set, wherein the incremental budget updates caused by the transaction also are stored in the first storage.

12. The system of claim 11, wherein the second storage is to store data representing the revenue items and the budget items.

13. The system of claim 12, wherein the second storage includes pointers to documents in the first storage.

14. A computer readable medium storing program instructions that, when executed by a processing system, cause the system to:

responsive to an admitted transaction, determine if the transaction includes revenue that is relevant to any RIB rule,

if so, for each RIB rule relevant to the posted revenue transaction;

read historical data from a RIB database,

calculate an incremental budget increase pursuant to the RIB rule,

revise the historical data in the RIB database based on the revenue of the new transaction, and

store the incremental budget value in the RIB database and in the transaction database.

15. The medium of claim 14, wherein the incremental budget value is stored immediately after the calculation.

16. The medium of claim 14, wherein the incremental budget value is stored pursuant to a periodic system update.

17. The medium of claim 14, wherein the determination comprises:

searching across multiple sets of RIB rules of multiple RIB ledgers for rules that are relevant to the revenue item,

performing each RIB rule identified from the search, and

storing relevant data and RIB increases in RIB databases associated with the respective RIB rule sets.

18. The medium of claim 14, wherein instructions further cause the system to:

store documents of the transaction in the transaction database and

store in the RIB database pointers to locations of the stored documents in the transaction database.