Business reporting under system failures

摘要

Provided is a method of business reporting in which information is not assumed to be one hundred percent (100%) accurate. A confidence factor is incorporated into business reporting such that any particular business report includes a calculation of the confidence that the particular information is valid. The confidence factor is a floating point value between zero (0) and one (1), with a value of ‘0’ indicating that the corresponding data cannot be assumed to be reliable and a value of ‘1’ indicating that the data is as reliable as is possible. If there is no confidence factor, then the factor is assumed to have a value of ‘1’ so that unnecessary confidence reporting is avoided. Also provided is means for disabling the confidence factor reporting so that unnecessary processing may be prevented when desired.