Practice Manager - Audit trail for client history
Client History
It would be great to have a running record of client history in XPM, showing the date and person who, including but not limited to:
- created the client
- edited client details
- archived client
In a large firm over multiple offices, it would be easier to know who to contact if there are questions about details are entered into XPM, and keep XPM as a CRM up to date.
Hi everyone, thanks for sharing on your needs for a comprehensive client audit trail in XPM. We understand this feature is critical for accountability and data integrity, and we hear you on the pain points this is causing.
As you might've read and heard updates of our teams are currently working on a unified experience across practice tools with the Xero Partner Hub.
History of client changes aren't wrapped into the initial work, but this is something the team would like to look at longer term and for now we'll move the idea to Accepted. Once Xero Partner Hub is fully released we can consider and will share any updates around history with you all here
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Campbell Green
commented
Building on this, the existence of client-level history makes a strong case for extending audit visibility across the broader XPM data model - particularly into job-level activity.
From an ecosystem perspective, there’s also a practical way to support this alongside any native UI approach.
Enabling structured, high-quality change events via the XPM API (e.g. webhooks) would make it possible to capture a complete, time-based history of changes across both clients and jobs.
This would allow:
- A consistent audit model across client records, job records, and associated activity
- Independent preservation of change history over time
- Greater flexibility for firms to build reporting, controls, and review workflowsOne key consideration, based on experience with other endpoints, is signal quality (Invoices implementation is excessively verbose). For audit data to be usable in practice, events need to be:
Field-level and meaningful (e.g. assigned user, due date, status)
Clearly structured (who, what, when)
Manageable in volume (to avoid excessive noise)A combined approach - consistent native audit visibility plus structured event capture - would create a much stronger foundation for both operational transparency and long-term record integrity across XPM.
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Campbell Green
commented
It’s encouraging to see that audit trail capability has already been recognised as important within Practice Manager (e.g. client history).
From a Control‑C perspective, this highlights something broader - consistency of record across XPM.
As firms rely on XPM to manage clients, jobs, deadlines, and responsibility, it becomes part of the system of record when outcomes are reviewed. That reliance isn’t limited to client changes - it extends directly to job ownership, due dates, status progression, and time allocation.
If audit visibility exists in some areas (e.g. client history) but not others (e.g. job lifecycle), the overall record becomes fragmented.
Without a complete history of who changed what, and when across both client and job layers, it becomes increasingly difficult to evidence and verify how outcomes occurred over time.
At that point, this moves beyond a feature gap into a data integrity and defensibility consideration.
We expect this to become more important as workflows become increasingly dynamic - particularly with more system-driven changes occurring via integrations and automation.
If XPM is used to assign accountability, it should also support visibility into how that accountability was established — consistently across the full record.
Strong support for building this out across jobs as well as client history. The value is in the completeness and continuity of the record, not isolated audit points.
Campbell
Control-C Founder -
HCM Cloud
commented
We need this ASAP!!!
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Kim Wallace
commented
This is something we have been asking for for years.
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Nicole Johnson
commented
This cannot happen quick enough!
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Paul Howlett
commented
Translation:
"While we recognise that this is critical functionality that our software is missing, we'll get around to it eventually! Maybe. lol, please just stop asking."
🙄
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Shirley Stanley
commented
In old invoicing in the history section it showed who an invoice was sent to, now it only shows that it was sent (SENT BY and DATE). It would be nice to be able to prove that the invoice was sent to a specific person. I cannot attach screen shot as it shows client email addresses, however can provide should it be required.
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Kath Milo
commented
An audit trail for client history would be invaluable. Also (and I'll post a new idea for this), our current PM system syncs to Companies House, which is extremely useful and time efficient when onboarding new clients
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Ettiene Triegaardt
commented
I'm sitting with a situation now where staff are saying that Xero is changing info, and I can't prove that it is them doing it. Now they say that they can't trust Xero.
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Kyle Bethune
commented
This is critical from a fraud perspective. What's to stop an employee from changing a client's bank account details, receiving a refund, and then changing them back?
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Louis Trichardt
commented
Hi,
I would also like the status changes per job to be logged to show who changed what and when on the state tab of the job under notes.
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David Cooke
commented
I agree this is really important. Especially given the integration with other systems, eg Class, Nowinfinity, etc.
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Barbara Turnbull
commented
This is important because some changes are made due to the interaction with other programs and some made by staff. If there are continual errors this feature with help find the cause.
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Babs Bright
commented
important for identifying training areas and reduction of errors
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Xero Ideas at GT
commented
This is basic function of a good CRM. It is critical to assist with many aspects including data cleansing and data quality, understanding what and why something in the system has occurred, and for security - for example so we can see who has changed bank account details and when.
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Stacey Reedman
commented
This would be a good idea
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Susan Edwards
commented
Think this is critical info for practices to know when the client accounts were created.
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Tyler Caskey
commented
This would be great to have
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Candice Randall
commented
This is critical information for any practice. Please look into adding this as a feature in the very near future.
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Jope Tawake
commented
We just highlighted the same with our Account Manager, the only addition is to also include time stamps & deletions audit as well