Patent ID: 7337950

Claim:
A method for managing an institution's workflow and data collection during a transaction life-cycle, comprising the steps of: configuring system policies to match the institution's objectives; storing transaction data for a transaction on a retrievable storage media; comparing transaction data against the configured system policies; displaying current transaction data for a transaction as said transaction transitions through various workflow steps in a transaction life-cycle; processing a workflow for a transaction, comprising the steps of: identifying a transaction; deciding the appropriate transaction workflow step in a set of potentially affected workflow steps; executing a function on a workflow step; monitoring the status of each transaction in said set of potentially affected workflow steps; and determining, in response to said deciding step, said executing step and said monitoring step, a next step for each said workflow step in said set of potentially affected workflow steps in which said status changes from incomplete to ready; configuring the user profiles into a process hierarchy and a department hierarchy which reflects the institution's operational and organizational hierarchical structures; creating an approval policy for requiring certain transactions to obtain certain approval types; creating a legal review policy for requiring certain transactions to receive approval from a qualified user within the institution; creating a policy rules repository for the recording and customization of the institution business rules; developing document profiles which specify the characteristics of documents and said characteristics' timing within the transaction life-cycle; and creating a document rules repository for the generation of a document checklist; and configuring the institutional policies based upon the rules and regulations of the institution.