🧾 Audit trail

Who changed what, and when. Ledger entries created, edited or deleted; expense claims approved, rejected and paid; supplier bank details changed; permissions granted; settings altered; officers signing in.

It is for the day something is disputed. For a charity’s treasurer and trustees that day is the difference between an awkward meeting and an unanswerable accusation.

What is recorded

Who did it (with their name kept, because accounts get deleted), when, from what address, and what actually changed — a compact before-and-after of the fields that moved, not a copy of the whole row. A full copy would quietly build a second database of members’ personal details in the one table nothing ever deletes. Account numbers are stored masked; sort codes are kept whole, because “changed from the high-street bank to a mobile-only one” is the sentence a trustee needs to read.

It cannot be edited

There is no edit and no delete on the screen. Each line also carries a fingerprint of itself and of the line before it, so a row altered directly in the database can be detected — press Check the chain. Be clear about what that does and does not do: it catches a quiet single change, and it does not stop somebody with full database access rewriting the whole chain. Nothing in a plugin can.

How long it is kept

Under Settings → Data & GDPR, and the default is to keep it. A charity keeps accounting records six years from the end of the financial year; a dispute almost never surfaces in the year it happened, but at the next examination or when somebody stands down. Seven years is the suggested figure. A trail deleted after twelve months is empty at exactly the moment somebody first asks of it.

This is not the same as a member’s contact history, which is what the club did with a member and lives on their record. The audit trail is what officers did to the system.

Common questions

Will this fill up with thousands of rows from the demo data?

No. Bulk work — building demo data, importing members — is paused for the duration, because ten thousand generated rows would bury a season of real ones.

It says the chain was trimmed. Is that a problem?

No. That is the retention sweep having removed old lines from the start of the chain, which is expected and is reported differently from a line having been altered. Only altered means something is wrong.