Everyday use · 4 min read

Comments and the audit trail

Leaving a comment, reading the trail, and what an auditor can tell from the sequence numbers.

Two records, deliberately separate

Comments are what people say about an improvement. The audit trail is what the system observed happening to it. Keeping them apart is what lets the trail be trustworthy: nobody can add an entry to it by hand, because there is no way to.

Commenting

The comments panel sits near the foot of an open record. Type into the box and select Add comment. The button stays disabled until you have written something.

Comments

Each comment is stamped with your name and the date. Comments are a good place for the things that do not belong in the description — a decision taken in a meeting, a supplier's response, a reason for a slipped date.

The audit trail

Every mutation writes an entry. Creating the record, each edit, each transition, archiving, linking and unlinking issues — all of it lands here, newest first.

Audit trail

Reading an entry

Each line carries four things:

• A sequence number — #7. Unique and increasing within that improvement.
• The date the change happened.
• Who made it. Scheduled jobs appear as system actions.
• What changed — the action, plus the names of the fields affected, for example Changed: status, reviewDate.

Why the sequence number matters

Timestamps are not enough on their own. Two events written in the same millisecond would sort arbitrarily, and a missing event would be invisible. The sequence gives every entry a definite position, and means a gap can be spotted: if a trail runs #1, #2, #4, something has been removed.

This is usually the first thing an auditor tests, and it is the difference between a history and an audit trail.

What cannot happen to it

• Entries cannot be edited. There is no update path in the app at all.
• Entries cannot be deleted individually. There is no delete path either.
• The only way to remove history is for a project administrator to delete the whole improvement, which takes the record, its comments and its entire trail together. That action is confirmed in the interface and logged. See Archiving and deleting.

Using the trail in a review

Three questions it answers quickly:

• "When did this actually get done?" — the transition to Implemented, with a date and a name, rather than whatever the target date says.
• "Who changed the forecast?" — edits record the field names, so a change to the benefit case is visible even though the old value is not shown.
• "Has this been sitting still?" — a trail whose last entry is four months old tells you more than a status of In progress does.