The notion of a quasi-hereditary algebra has been introduced by E. Cline, B. Parshall and L. Scott [7,2,5] in order to describe the so-called highest weight categories arising in the representation theory of Lie algebras and algebraic groups. Quasi-hereditary algebras are defined by the existence of a suitable chain of ideals, and the finite dimensional hereditary algebras are typical examples. In [3], also finite dimensional algebras of global dimension 2 are shown to be quasi-hereditary. Thus, the Auslander algebras are quasi-hereditary. Recall that the Auslander algebras A can be constructed in the following way. Let R be a representation-finite finite dimensional algebra; then A is the endomorphism algebra End(Affl), where M is a finite dimensional /{-module such that every indecomposable /{-module is isomorphic to a direct summand of M. We are going to introduce the notion of a splitting filtration on the class of all indecomposable /{-modules and show that in this way we obtain a heredity chain of ideals of A (see the definition below). Usually, there exist many splitting filtrations for a given R. Examples of splitting filtrations can be obtained from the Rojter measure, used by A. V. Rojter in his proof of the first Brauer-Thrall conjecture [6], or from the preprojective and preinjective partitions, introduced by M. Auslander and S. Smalo in [1]. Instead of dealing with finite dimensional algebras, we shall consider, more generally, semiprimary rings. Recall that an associative ring A with 1 is called semiprimary provided that its Jacobson radical TV is nilpotent and A/N is semisimple artinian. We say that an ideal J of A is a heredity ideal of A if P = J, JNJ = 0 and /, considered as a right ideal, is a projective ^-module. Following [2], a semiprimary ring A is said to be quasi-hereditary provided that there exists a chain