The present invention provides a solution to the needs described above through a system and method for a business applications server. The automated system of the present invention uses a persistence framework to provide a process for saving and restoring state of business objects and for performing operations thereon, and metadata driven processes to dynamically define class properties and behavior for each class of business object, in order to control the execution of the required tasks with minimum use of redundant data input to the several applications, thereby minimizing the use of hardware resources and user input and programming effort.