Having this explanation can drive internal accountability or assist to meet audit requirements. It provides peace-of-mind to managers that historic values are never truly lost (without the need to revert to restoring backups).
It can identify gaps in processes – users interacting with the software in an unanticipated way or misunderstanding the fields they are entering – which can then be translated into rules automatically monitored and enforced via Greentree’s powerful Approvals and Alerts module, and other automation tools.
The most important area to have this data transparency in is masterfile data – Customers, Suppliers, GL Accounts, Stock Items – and the base Greentree application includes Masterfile audit trail functionality for the main fields on these objects, when they are changed through most standard processes (for example, normal data entry in the Windows Desktop application).
But we have found that our clients are interested in other transactional data, too. They do not want to be restricted in the fields they can account for, and they want to know that the auditing process will capture all required changes – whether those changes are occurring in the Desktop product, in the browser, via eDocs or EDI, the API or Excel (FREE) uploads… or anyhow the data was changed!
The solution needed to not slow down the user’s experience, it needed to be easy to interact with via the front-end, and it needed to be efficient in disk space usage so as to avoid ‘ballooning’ the database with historic audit data.
On this brief, the development team at Endeavour has this year finalized work on what we call the Audit Schema.