Patent ID: 8666903

Claim:
A method for providing procurement services to a plurality of customer companies with complex accounting rules while providing secure information viewing in support of said customer companies, said customer companies being organized in a plurality of customer company groups and procurement coalitions for volume discounts and access to shared contracts with respect to a plurality of vendors, with procurement contracts leveraged across company groups, said method comprising: generating, by a computer, a user profile for each user of a plurality of users in customer companies of the plurality of customer companies, wherein the generated user profile for each user of the plurality of users specifies (i) that each user of the plurality of users is authorized by a first customer company of the plurality of customer companies to access procurement resources and the procurement services for purchasing items and (ii) the first customer company and a first company group of related customer companies of the plurality of customer companies; inserting, by the computer, in a computer database the user profile for each user of the plurality of users; inserting, by the computer, the first customer company in the first company group, wherein all customer companies in the first company group are commonly owned by a same owner; providing, by the computer, access to volume discounts with respect to the plurality of vendors, to said all customer companies in the first company group and all customer companies in a second company group of the plurality of company groups; specifying, by the computer, the volume discounts in shared contracts for purchase of items from the vendors by said all customer companies in the first and second company groups, wherein the volume discounts specified in the shared contracts are based on volume specific terms in the shared contracts; authorizing, by the computer, companies to have access to and share each procurement resource, said authorizing comprising providing a resource profile specifying for each procurement resource a set of customer companies of the plurality of customer companies authorized for accessing and sharing each procurement resource to be shared among the plurality of users; and controlling, by the computer, access to the procurement resources based on the first customer company and the first company group in the user profile for each user of the plurality of users and on the resource profile for each procurement resource.