Hello,

I was looking for some advice on how best to document certain requirements that I have elicited for a project I am working on.  i will describe the business/user requirements in description form below and I am looking for suggestion for how to define the requirements in a business requirements document ("The system shall provide the ability to...") and how to define it for the developers (if it should be different).  Any thoughts would be appreciated!  I don't have another BA here and would like to bounce other ideas against my own.

PROJECT BACKGROUND

This project entails doing some data processing on individual files containing a variable number of records.  We import the files into this system, then some functions operate on the whole file in batch, and then the user may work on accounts individually depending on the status of the batch functions run against the whole file.

REQUIREMENTS

1.) The first business/user requirement that I am looking for help on is for the system to be able to generate a progress report.  The report needs to show the total number of records on the imported file, each potential account status along with the number of records in each status, and a list of each function that has been performed on the file/records and when. 

What I have done is defined the requirement in the BRD as "The system shall provide the ability to generate a progress report.".  Then, I have written a use case describing how a person would run the report.  Then, I mocked up a sample for how the report should look.  The one issue I have is that the report should look slightly different under certain circumstances and I am not sure how to document that (i.e. the report should display or not display additional information if certain values are present).

2.) The second requirement that I am looking for help on is a little more complicated.  It is for the system to be able to import data.  The files coming from our clients are Excel files containing information about a person and their dependents, which could be any number (but usually no more than 3).  Most of our clients are not very tech saavy so our data layout can't be very complicated.  Our business has decided to provide them with a layout that looks like the following:

We are telling them that if there is more than one dependent, they should add columns for Dependent 2, Dependent 3 etc...  I am struggling with how to define the requirements for this import for the business and for the developers.

Thanks - Jim