Patent ID: 7110959

Claim:
A transaction auditing system for a business transaction involving at least two remotely-situated parties, the system comprising: a data storage arrangement adapted to store user profile information including party-identifying information for parties to a business transaction, to store aspects of business transactions, the aspects including specified events that would occur at different times and to provide information indicative of a status of the transaction; and a central processing arrangement coupled to the data storage arrangement and adapted to: receive event data for one of the specified events from one of the remotely-situated parties, the event data having a timing-related characteristic and information for associating the specified event with a common business transaction; receive event data for another one of the specified events from another one of the remotely-situated parties, the event data having a timing-related characteristic and information for associating the specified event with a common business transaction; automatically associate the received event data for the specified events with a particular common business transaction and with at least one of the parties as a function of the confirmation data and the user profile information; and determine an elapsed time between the specified events as a function of the received confirmation data and automatically audit the particular common transaction as a function of the elapsed time.