The paper presents a view on the development of a business information system that is firmly based on the theory of the firm and theories about business contracts. The common element in those theories is the notion that doing business is embedded in institutional and social structures. Hence, a business agreement cannot be reduced merely to a quantifiable exchange of goods, as the neoclassical economic view would have it. This means that information about business agreements involves much more than the order information represented in the IT system. It is about an understanding of background, commitments, expectations. Context and interpretation play an important role. Hence, development of a business information system cannot be reduced to IT systems only, other information channels have to be analysed and designed as well. Founded in business and legal theory, the paper argues against two kinds of distortion in developing information systems for business: distorting business processes by a reductionistic understanding of the nature of business agreements, and distortion of business information by reducing it to IT-processable data only.