Business rules arise from the best practices of knowledgeable business professionals. A business rule is a rule that describes, defines, guides, controls, suggests, influences or otherwise constrains some aspect of knowledge or structure within some business domain.
Professional accountants work with business rules every day and the tend to not realize that they do so. Most of the business rules are available only in human-readable form. With more and more information being made available in structured form, such as XBRL-based public company financial reports, machine-readable business rules are becoming increasingly important.
The document Comprehensive Introduction to Business Rules for Professional Accountants helps professional accountants and other business professionals get their heads around business rules.