corporation which only affect the data relating to a single state again the parent child tables allow the calculation engine to minimise the number of calculations required if the relationships are complex and inter related the calculation engine may have to perform iterations which converge to a result in some cases the complexity is such that resolution is impractical either taking to many computing resources or too long to perform in this situation the user may be required to simplify their request by reducing the number of changes or the number and type of parent child relationships or the data relationships formulae it is our observation that the use of the process described in this invention greatly speeds up the obtaining of results in decision support systems and other business planning applications using typical data warehousing or planning data repository pdr type operations the magnitude of the savings is very dependent on the actual data and the savings in each case must be assessed separately fig3 also shows the various mathematical relationships between the values in various cells in this example the relationships are simple but they may be arbitrarily complex in cases where the relationships are redundant they must be consistent with one another the fig4 is a table summarising the relevant parent child relationships for the data in fig3 each of the rows 410 411 412 413 414 415 416 shows in the first column.