There is a difference between a "business process" and a "business decision". This 50 minute video explains the difference between the two.
In a prior blog post I brainstormed about workflow and mentioned the Business Process Model Notation (BPMN) which is an OMG standard.
There is another OMG standard, Decision Model And Notiation (DMN). Decision Model and Notation (DMN) is a standard established by the Object Management Group (OMG) for describing and modeling operational decisions. This article explains DMN.
The DMN standard can be used together with the BPMN standard for designing and modeling business processes and workflows.
The Decision Model and Notation (DMN) defines a Friendly Enough Expression Language (FEEL). FEEL is the default expression language for DMN. S-FEEL is a simple subset of FEEL, for decision models that use only simple expressions, mostly or only using decision tables.
You can get a free 30 day trial of a software product Signavo that creates BPMN and DMN.
So, once you have all these rules; how do you process the rules? The answer is using a rules engine. What is a rule engine? A rules engine basically processes rules. (See this article on Drools.)
For example, Drools is rules engine or a "Production Rule System" that uses the rule-based approach to implement and Expert System. Expert Systems are knowledge-based systems that use knowledge representation to process acquired knowledge into a knowledge base that can be used for reasoning.
A Production Rule System is Turing complete with a focus on knowledge representation to express propositional and first-order logic in a concise, non-ambiguous and declarative manner. The brain of a Production Rules System is an Inference Engine that can scale to a large number of rules and facts. The Inference Engine matches facts and data against Production Rules – also called Productions or just Rules – to infer conclusions which result in actions. A Production Rule is a two-part structure that uses first-order logic for reasoning over knowledge representation. A business rule engine is a software system that executes one or more business rules in a runtime production environment.
And that is why you WANT to look at a financial report as a logical sytem.