Patent ID: 7693791

Claim:
A transaction-processing system for managing payment resources for a plurality of transactions involving merchant offerings among parties including buyers and sellers, different ones of the plurality of transactions involving different sets of buyer and seller parties, the system comprising: a data storage arrangement configured, for each of the plurality of transactions, to store data characterizing historical fulfillment quantities and historical billed quantities of ordered items that have been received; and a computer arrangement configured and programmed, for each ordered item listed on an invoice for each of the plurality of transactions, to associate the invoice with one of the plurality of transactions, in response to a difference between a quantity of ordered item for which payment is requested on the invoice and the historical data for the ordered item in the data storage arrangement, using the difference as a basis to generate electronic pre-payment reconciliation data for each ordered item listed on the invoice, and thereby generating the reconciliation data based on the quantity of the ordered item listed on the invoice and the difference, and update historical billed quantities for the ordered item as characterized in the data stored in the data storage arrangement as a function of the quantity of the ordered item in the invoice.