A lot of ideas have been posted on H&N (more commonly known as "Audit trail reporting") on this forum, and its predecessor forum too, but can we try this again, one more time?
Xero needs to revamp its H&N report, to meet basic software security guidelines. At the moment, error and fraud CANNOT be easily detected, at least without of a lot of unnecessary work.
See the link below for Audit trail requirements in software from countries like India that take this seriously.
Here are my 6 suggestions, of which 2-5 are the really important ones:
1. Export - H&N report needs to be exportable to Excel.
2. Full transactions - Transactions should be fully visible, not truncated in "Note" form. To deep dive into audit trail you need as many columns as there are on the Account Transaction report
3. Full History - a good audit trail will be a detail report. The whole history of every transaction in all of its gruesome or geeky detail needs to be on the face of the report. If you are looking for a needle in a haystack, it doesn't help to put the hay into small bags , as we then need to open all of the bags to examine the hay! Just let us examine the whole trail without clicking on each transaction and second guessing which transaction may be the right one.
4. Filters - it needs way more filters, as you would have on the Account Transaction report (eg Date of transaction, not just the date it was Modified)
5. Audit ID number - a unique ID is needed for every transaction. (an ID is actually viewable in the "Journal report" but crazily enough, after all these years, Xero still haven't made this ID a unique ID as it changes on every edit of the transaction. This is like finding your needle to find that someone has greased it and it falls straight back into the haystack!)
6. Technical log vs Audit log (see second link below) - these logs are not separated out making it harder to trawl through eg the date the document was uploaded is known as the technical log, and shouldn't be on display with the transactional or true Audit log.
So please Xero, up your game and whatever is easier, prioritise this really important report, perhaps revamp the Journal report, which is much closer to what we need than the History & Notes report.
Jason Grant
supported this idea
·
A lot of ideas have been posted on H&N (more commonly known as "Audit trail reporting") on this forum, and its predecessor forum too, but can we try this again, one more time?
Xero needs to revamp its H&N report, to meet basic software security guidelines. At the moment, error and fraud CANNOT be easily detected, at least without of a lot of unnecessary work.
See the link below for Audit trail requirements in software from countries like India that take this seriously.
Here are my 6 suggestions, of which 2-5 are the really important ones:
1. Export - H&N report needs to be exportable to Excel.
2. Full transactions - Transactions should be fully visible, not truncated in "Note" form. To deep dive into audit trail you need as many columns as there are on the Account Transaction report
3. Full History - a good audit trail will be a detail report. The whole history of every transaction in all of its gruesome or geeky detail needs to be on the face of the report. If you are looking for a needle in a haystack, it doesn't help to put the hay into small bags , as we then need to open all of the bags to examine the hay! Just let us examine the whole trail without clicking on each transaction and second guessing which transaction may be the right one.
4. Filters - it needs way more filters, as you would have on the Account Transaction report (eg Date of transaction, not just the date it was Modified)
5. Audit ID number - a unique ID is needed for every transaction. (an ID is actually viewable in the "Journal report" but crazily enough, after all these years, Xero still haven't made this ID a unique ID as it changes on every edit of the transaction. This is like finding your needle to find that someone has greased it and it falls straight back into the haystack!)
6. Technical log vs Audit log (see second link below) - these logs are not separated out making it harder to trawl through eg the date the document was uploaded is known as the technical log, and shouldn't be on display with the transactional or true Audit log.
So please Xero, up your game and whatever is easier, prioritise this really important report, perhaps revamp the Journal report, which is much closer to what we need than the History & Notes report.
As mentioned above:
For a classic Audit trail report see here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9rP24cQ0ps
Audit trail requirements now legally required in India
(Recording an audit trail of every transaction,
Creating an audit log of every change that's made in the books of accounts, Capturing the date details about when changes are made, Ensuring that the audit trail can't be disabled)
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/localfunctionality/india/india-audit-trail-edit-logs-accounting-software