1. A computer system for loading data from a spreadsheet dataset, having data in the form of one or more records, into a database comprising: a) a storage device configured to store a control file containing a set of rules, each rule having a condition, wherein the set of rules describe mappings between attributes of the spreadsheet dataset and attributes of a business object; b) a processor configured to execute a spreadsheet loader having as inputs the spreadsheet dataset and the control file, wherein: i) each rule in the control file is evaluated for each record to determine if the condition is true for the record, and the records being parsed into one or more tokens if the condition is true; ii) each of the one or more tokens are assigned values based on a value clause, wherein each of the values is associated with one of the attributes of the business object; and iii) the spreadsheet loader sends the parsed data to the database, wherein the parsed data is stored in the database using a data access layer comprising an entity definition and a persistence map, wherein the entity definition defines the business object based on attributes of the database and the persistence map defines how to store the parsed data in the database.
2. A computer system in accordance with claim 1 , wherein the set of rules within the control file includes a variable rule.