An object oriented trade finance system designed to support a large-scale transactional work flow on a global basis. The system supports all facets of the trade finance business including but not limited to letters of credit, collections, bankers acceptances and reimbursements. A trade finance system organized into a central and distributed location hardware architecture having a user interface of a user work station which communicates with an application server including business objects. The business objects communicate with a database to obtain the data needed for the business logic and include all the business logic needed for the system. Work flow distribution rules are used to distribute the work items to a work item list for work group that can be distributed geographically in different time zones and to allow processing to continue when the originally assigned workgroup has reached an end of its business day.