The Audit Trail

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The Audit Trail

ACCOUNTS has what is called an "audit trail". What that means is that every time you create a new financial transaction, change a transaction, or delete a transaction, that fact is recorded in your database. That includes transactions that are created indirectly for you, for instance with the Database Import Transactions menu option, or when you are reconciling accounts and you let it add a transaction for a service charge or interest for you.

 

You can then print out a report of all of those activities on each transaction, with Reports Accountant Audit Trail.

 

Having an audit trail helps protect against (and detect) either intentional or accidental changes to transactions that might hide suspicious activity.

 

There is only one extremely rarely used exception to the statement that all activity on transactions is tracked in the audit trail. The Database SQL Select menu option can be used to make arbitrary changes to the data in your database, but only with the agreement of Software4Nonprofits and with a special password from us. This agreement is almost never granted, as everything you need to do in ACCOUNTS should be covered by its built-in features. For technical reasons, however, if such agreement were ever to be granted for using SQL statements to modify existing transactions, it would be almost impossible to have them tracked properly in the audit trail.


This topic was last edited on Sep 9, 2022