About business rules

A business rule is an executable program that performs a business task. In Planning Business Modeler, business rules operate on the multidimensional data in a model. For example, you can use rules to allocate resources, calculate forecasts, determine variances, and find key performance indicators (KPIs). Rules can help you run queries, seed data in Microsoft Office Excel forms, and move balances from one period to another.

Some rules can be run directly by users, and other rules can be run only as part of a specific type of job. When run, a rule applies the actions that are written in the rule statement.

Each rule has three specific characteristics that govern how the rule is processed by Planning Business Modeler. These are rule set type, rule type, and rule implementation.

In This Section

• About rule set types and rule types
  Provides an overview of types of rule sets and rules, and describes the relationships between them.

• About rule implementations
  Describes the options for implementing rules that govern how a rule is compiled and processed.

• About system-defined rules for financial models
  Describes the rules that are automatically generated by Planning Business Modeler.

Related Sections

• Customizing business rules
  Provides more detailed discussions of how to write a business rule, and the elements of a business rule

• Security for business rules
  Describes the key roles and permissions that affect rule security

• PerformancePoint Expression Language Reference
  Provides programming guides and detailed reference information about the language for creating custom business rules