System and method for the cascading definition and enforcement of EDI rules

An efficient organizer of companion guide rules is created by a validation application from the common set of rules among an industry's implementation guide and the rulebooks, such as companion guides of one or more entities, such as payers. The organizer of companion guide rules creates an inventory of all rules and a profile for each companion guide and stores each profile in metadata storage. Each profile contains pointers to code in the inventory for all the rules employed by the corresponding companion guide. After an EDI document reaches the validation application, a runtime checker engine checks metadata storage for a current rule set for the payer. A rule set is created the first time a profile is accessed during the validation process and whenever the profile is updated. The runtime checker engine attempts to validate the EDI document by comparing it to the current rule set for a payer's companion guide.