Abstract: A method, system, and computer readable medium to process transaction records obtained from electronic commerce applications (ECAs) as staged transactions before posting to an accounting ledger in a financial management application (FMA). In this manner, the user (e.g., small business owner, book keeper, or accountant), the ECA developer, and the FMA provider are allowed to focus on their respective domain knowledge while allowing the financial management application, augmented by user-defined rules that are appropriate to the business in question, to automate the accounting ledger posting.

Abstract: A method for cash forecasting creates a plurality of event streams associated with a user of an online accounting service, identifies a first pattern in a first event stream that is a commitment and a second pattern in a second event stream that is a repeated pattern, generates a characterization for each of the plurality of event streams based on each identified pattern for the event stream, predicts one or more expected cash payments and one or more corresponding expected dates for each of the event streams using the characterization for the event stream and a forecasting model, receives a query related to cash flow through an application program interface (API), and responds to the query based on the one or more of the expected cash payments, the corresponding expected dates, and the one or more measures of uncertainty, to the query.