Patent ID: 7216101

Claim:
A method for processing an inbound document received from a trading partner in a business-to-business electronic commerce data processing system, the method comprising the steps of: storing templates for automatically creating trading partner profiles, receiving an inbound document from a trading partner, determining if a profile for said trading partner is stored in a profile database, and if no such profile is stored, automatically creating a profile by: retrieving a template associated with the inbound document; reading the template to determine what data is to be extracted from the inbound document and extracting said data; and creating a profile record for the trading partner in the profile database and populating said profile record with said extracted data, wherein the profile is automatically created only if an auto-creation flag is pre-set, and wherein the system stores an auto-creation flag for each of a plurality of interworking standards, and the system determines the relevant standard associated with the received inbound document and determines if there is an auto-creation flag set for the determined standard.