The invention supports the management of financial assets such as accounts receivable or mortgages. The invention provides a facility for a user to define rules to segregate assets into pools, define purchasing rules, capture real time information regarding transactions, reconcile payments and produce exception reports, define access rules for individual users to see information relating to pools of assets and individual assets within a pool, and provide customized reports and access to asset details over a network. Abstract representations of financial assets are used to obtain instances of defined financial-asset object classes to define pools of financial assets with common abstract characteristics. The invention uses a tree structured representation of asset classes for allocation of transactions to tranches and sub-tranches of assets within a pool. A user may define custom tranches and sub-tranches, as well as design pools of assets to an investment rating specification in advance.