Financial and business experts possess knowledge acquired in practice and which cannot be entirely found in literature that is invaluable to a business success of a firm or a financial institution. Therefore, special attention is paid to creating expert systems in a domain of finance, so that the domain knowledge could be accessible to a wider circle of people in the first place and also to make the work in this field easier.

Important advantages in using an expert system are the uniformity of knowledge and a possibility of its improvement over time. For example, if an expert system is used in giving help while evaluating risks of investment in a firm, then every relevant parameter is treated with special attention, without the fear that some situation could be differently estimated by various experts or clerks, or that some important parameters would not be taken into consideration. If any new parameter is important for a company, then it is added to the knowledge base and is taken into consideration during the decision-making process.

In the development of our Scorecards, the knowledge from the international literature has been used and further knowledge acquisition has been conducted through a series of interviews with more than 200 CEOs and CFOs of large and small corporations. Decision tables have been used to elicit the knowledge from the experts in the most efficient way, while a binomial decision tree model provides a graphical representation of the acquired knowledge. The representation through production rules is used to implement the acquired heuristics in a knowledge base.

The acquired knowledge is represented in the knowledge base through production rules. Our Scorecard’s knowledge is represented in the set of an estimated total of 1000 rules, representing over 5,000 possible combinations of the evaluation criteria. Basically, there are two major sets of rules: one concerning the evaluation of firms based on their financial and/or business inputs, while the other involves the qualitative evaluation of a firm through the examination of the strategic variables.