Patent ID: 8775370

Claim:
A computer readable storage medium containing instructions, wherein the instructions, when executed by a computer, cause the computer to perform: storing, in a database, price data of an article or a service at one stage during a process, the article or the service being sold at an end of the process consisting of a plurality of stages, and the price of the article or the service being changeable at each stage; creating, when the database receives price data at one of the stages, forecast data indicating predicted prices at subsequent stages and storing the created forecast data in the database; determining, when the database receives price data at one of the plurality of stages, whether a stage immediately previous to the one of the plurality of stages exists based on an order of the stages in the process; and creating offset data indicating a negative value of the predicted price indicated in the forecast data for offsetting forecast data created at the stage immediately previous to the one of the multiple stages when the immediately previous stage is determined to exist at the determining, and storing the offset data in the database, wherein the price data is provided in different format depending on a system which provides the price data.