Techniques enable a user, such as a business analyst or a system administrator, to define business process rules that control the processing of transaction data by a computer application. A data structure is used to store business process rules. The data structure includes a condition portion and an execution portion of a rule. At runtime, the computer system executing a computer application determines whether a condition portion of a rule is met, and in response to a determination that the condition portion is met, performs an execution portion of the rule. When an execution portion of the rule is performed, the computer system generates and stores a protocol entry in a rule protocol data structure that corresponds to the rule. A protocol entry in the rule protocol data structure may custom attributes. The protocol entries in the rule protocol data structure that relate to a particular data object may be displayed.