Patent ID: 8086486

Claim:
A method for managing information and rendering discounts in a billing system, the method comprising: receiving, at a computer system, a customer record including data wherein the record has a record type; processing the record with a rule-based accumulation engine at the computer system to accumulate the data in a plurality of predetermined target accumulators; establishing a rule-based discount engine to allow a user to define at least one compound rule for applying discounts to the customer, the at least one compound rule grouping together at least two or more simple rules in a tree structure with logical operands, each simple rule representing a criterion for applying discounts; processing the plurality of target accumulators with the discount engine at the computer system to render discounts applicable to the customer, wherein processing the plurality of target accumulators comprises evaluating the at least one compound rule with a rule router, the rule router recursively evaluating the compound rule by evaluating each of the one or more simple rules in the tree structure; and generating, with the computer system, one or more discounted bills in accordance with the rendered discounts.