XPM - Audit Trail for jobs in XPM
When using Xero Practice Manager (XPM) for job management, it’s incredibly difficult to maintain visibility because there’s no audit trail or history log for key actions like:
- When a job was created or reassigned
- Who changed the job’s due date or status
- When a job’s responsibility moved from one team member to another
This lack of transparency makes it almost impossible to track accountability or performance accurately.
Why is this so important?
As a firm, we track job completion and lodgement performance, but without a history log, we can’t see whether a job was reassigned after the due date or who made key changes.
That means staff can unfairly appear to have missed deadlines when, in reality, the work was only reallocated to them late in the process.
Xero Blue already has this functionality with a clear “History & Notes” section, so it’s surprising that this hasn’t carried through to XPM, where it’s arguably more critical for managing teams and deadlines.
Suggestion:
Add a “Job History” or “Change Log” panel in XPM that records:
- Date/time of changes
- Field changed (e.g. Assigned To, Due Date, Job State)
- User who made the change
This would dramatically improve accountability, transparency, and efficiency across firms using XPM for job tracking.
Sarah Schwarz
shared this idea
Thanks for sharing your feedback on introducing audit trail functionality to XPM. We appreciate you explaining how important visibility and accountability are for managing teams and tracking job performance.
We've reviewed your idea and now it's up to the community to get behind and support it. Make sure you share your idea with any colleagues that this could benefit so they can add their vote too!
Along with votes, other members can now comment to share additional detail about how your idea could improve their experience with Xero.
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Shahzada Waris Ali
commented
I strongly support this request.
From a practice management perspective, the lack of an audit trail is a significant issue. In particular, there is currently no clear way to establish who cancelled a job, when it was cancelled, or what the job status was before the change.
This becomes particularly important when XPM is used to monitor staff workloads, deadlines and performance. If a job is cancelled, reassigned or its due date is changed, there needs to be a reliable record showing who made the change and when. Without this, it can be very difficult to establish what actually happened when reviewing a missed deadline or an incomplete job.
A proper Job History would ideally record all significant actions, including job creation, cancellation, reopening, reassignment, changes to due dates, changes to job state and changes to the assigned staff member, together with the user and date/time of each action.
XPM is being used as a central practice management system, so having this level of auditability should be a fundamental part of the platform.
Please consider this a strong vote from our practice for this functionality.
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Carol Bovey
commented
Ditto to everything Sarah Schwarz has posted!
With all the other audit trails available in Xero it was quite disappointing to find these missing from Job Manager and we have had to continue using other tracking systems outside Xero. -
Campbell Green
commented
From a Control‑C perspective, this highlights something more fundamental than a missing feature.
As firms increasingly rely on XPM to allocate responsibility, manage deadlines, and assess performance, it effectively becomes part of the system of record when questions arise - whether internally, with clients, or during review processes.
Without a clear history of who changed what, and when, that record becomes harder to evidence and verify over time.
At that point, this moves beyond usability and into a data integrity and defensibility concern.
If key job attributes - such as ownership, due dates, or status - can change without an accessible history, it becomes difficult for firms to confidently explain how outcomes occurred, even where the underlying work was appropriate.
We expect this to become more important as automation and AI-driven workflows increase, and more changes are influenced by systems and integrations rather than direct user actions.
If a system is used to assign accountability, it should also support visibility into how that accountability was established.
Strong support for this being addressed. This is foundational to maintaining trust in practice data as systems continue to evolve.
Campbell
Control-C Founder -
Gabriella George
commented
There should be a comprehensive audit trail for jobs set up in XPM. In addition to the information about who created/modified details, individual time entries must show edited or moved details. We've had an instance where billable entries have been popping up into a client's job that should not have billable entries. What's scary is that these billable entries belong to various other clients who have no connection to the non-billable client. We cannot find who if anyone did move the entries and Xero does not have the ability to tell us either.