Enter your idea

This is a necessity

Have been asked by a number of practices for this feature request.
Specific audit trail items that would be beneficial:

Jobs added, updated, deleted (who, date/time, detail)
Clients & contacts added, updated, deleted (who, date/time, detail)
Invoices added, updated, deleted (who, date/time, detail) - aware that can see on the invoice history but in a report is more what they are after so they can report in bulk.
Tax returns added, updated, deleted (who, date/time, detail) - aware that history shows in tax returns when viewing the return but in report would be great to report in bulk.

Eleanor thanks, the New Journal report, is a big improvement on the old one!

Regarding audit trail, it does have both "posted date" and "posted by" columns, so small round of applause.

However there is a still unforunately a FUNDAMENTAL flaw in the "journal report" (journal in Xero terminology means transaction, not a "manual journal" as accountants would understand it, although you can still filter for Manual journals should you want with the "more" button)

The flaw is as follows. Xero assigns a "Journal ID" which is great - the core of good Audit trail. However, for some reason I just dont get, Xero doesnt understand that editing a transaction, SHOULD NOT in any circumstance lead to Xero amending the Journal ID!

A Journal ID gets assgined when you create a new transaction. It shouldn't give a new one on an edit! As it is the Journal ID facility is completely unreliable because if the transaction (sorry, journal) has been edited, you will no longer find that ID, as it has been deleted from the history. (bang head against the wall 3 times)

Other minor flaws:

....transaction type (Source type) is missing (duhh, reminds me of the VAT reports, where transaction types are also omitted!)

....Export to Excel button (the one I have been requesting for years) is there, but doesnt seem to work (maybe it's me but I doubt it)

So back to the drawing board (hopefully not for too long) Xero programmers

If you do get these fixes out soon, I would try to get the New Journal report into a full blown Audit trail report with permuations of each edit showing, after which you could dump History and Notes altogether, maybe into the same place edited Journal IDs get dumped ;)

Hooray, they've finally updated the journal report that fulfills this need!

How is it even possible that this software has been around for the time it has been without having this feature? It is very time consuming to go transaction by transaction to see who did what for a client account.

My application which is currently in development called RecHound will include everything requested on this product idea.

You can head to our website at www.rechound.com to join our mailing list to be notified when this becomes available.

We currently have a video with a transaction listing view, you can see there is a "show voided transactions" button in this (not demonstrated, but is currently working). We will also be adding transaction line numbers and journal numbers too. Also, will be adding a data dump file on our homepage which you can filter by account, date etc.

Thanks,
Alex

Can this include Payroll? An Audit trail for payroll is essential not a "nice to have" - who, when and what. Who made the original booking, when it was done (date & time) and details. And, almost more important, the same for any subsequent changes.

Hi Alex - that's great news!

I'd certainly be interested in this if you could post the details here when ready as you've suggested. It's a shame Xero can't have this integrated into the system (it's an absolute basic tool for accountants) but this would be very helpful!

Thanks, Ellie

Hi all,

I have good news on this idea - I am currently developing an application which will have this included as a feature. I have used the bullet points here as a reference to how we want this specific feature to work because I think this is quite well set out.

Currently we have a 'last edited' date column, along with a 'transaction entry' date column as well (alongside the journal date too obviously). Each transaction will have its own specific identifier, as well as each full journal entry having its own identifier as well. We have a switch which will add in all the voided transactions too, so you will be able to see literally every transaction ever posted, whether it's viewable in Xero or not.

Our application is foundationally a balance sheet reconciliation management tool, which will also allow the reconciliation of individual accounts by netting off your Xero transactions line by line. Great for clearing accounts. We noticed that we needed to generate our own 'audit report' of sorts in order to build our app, so we may as well add it as a feature too!

We are currently heavy in the testing phase for this. We will have a website with a mailing list up and running in the coming weeks - I will post it up here as soon as it's available for anyone interested.

Thanks!
Alex

I can't believe there is no audit trail. This is a terrible omission.

Agreed. But please do not in turn take away the existing method, where at each transaction you can instantly see the changes made at the bottom left corner. That is one incredibly useful tool.

Honestly the fact that there is no true audit trail for a bookkeeping software is so very poor! this needs to address and be more like Quickbooks or Sage 50

I would support this request as Audit Trial Report can save a lot of time to try and troubleshoot how final accounts or monthly close accounts was changed without Advisors knowing. This helps Xero keeps accounts integrity as all voids and corrections are strictly viewable in Audit Trials.

I find the xero audit trail painful. To be of value to me I would also like to see quantity as a choice

I am horrified that this level of audit trail is not available - how on earth does this even meet audit standards? I will stick with QB which shows you every change.

Erik - yes, I did find this report, but it's certainly not a friendly report that can easily be exported and manipulated to find a subset of information you need, as the information isn't all on a single row.
I would think, though, that this would mean that the information is all there and they should be able to easily produce a report that combines the information in the Journal Report and the format of the Account Transactions report - but that they're oddly choosing not to.

The Journal Report already shows the add/modify/delete date, username, and the Journal ID # unique identifier of every transaction regardless of the module. But it would be nice to include this data in fields of the Account Transactions report, let's say.