Audit Trail
An audit trail is a recorded history of changes to a record or field—what changed, when, why, and by what source or process.
Allocator relevance: Audit trails make claims defensible—critical when decision-makers dispute roles, ownership, or mandate signals.
Expanded Definition
An audit trail provides accountability. When a role changes or a contact is updated, the audit trail should preserve the previous value, timestamp the change, and capture the evidence source or workflow event that caused it. For allocator intelligence, audit trails prevent silent edits that break trust and make debugging possible when users report errors.
Audit trails also support internal QA: you can see patterns of frequent reversals, low-confidence sources, or fields that decay faster than expected.
Decision Authority & Governance
Audit trails are a governance requirement: define who can edit fields, what gets logged, and what is immutable. The best implementations log changes at the field level, not only at the profile level.
Common Misconceptions
- Audit trails are only for financial statements.
- Logging “updated at” is enough.
- Audit trails slow down iteration (they usually speed debugging).
Key Takeaways
- Audit trails turn data into a trustable system.
- Field-level logs matter more than record-level timestamps.
- Audit trails reduce correction cycles and disputes.