Is there an audit trail in Xero?

Am wondering if Xero has any intentions of including an audit trail. Unless I'm missing something, there only appears to be a record of the time a user logged in. No information as to any input/edit of transactions. There should be some kind of an audit trail report that  lists each accounting transaction and any additions, deletions, or modifications that affect that transaction.

Isn't an audit trail an integral part of what helps to secure the integrity of a good accounting app?

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Permalink Reply by Catherine (Xero) on November 3, 2010 at 0:26
Thanks for the feedback on wanting this in report format - would you see it being by user or by transaction or by type of transaction, or all of these options? At the moment you can get information about transaction activity in a couple of places, as well as login information that you mention.

History & Notes - displays on all transactions for both user and system-generated activity
Journal Report - many have found this useful as a trail of users creating journals

We also have this brief video overview covering these options.

Note for some users, their role might prevent them from getting to some of this information.
Permalink Reply by Earl Rudolfo on November 3, 2010 at 13:28
Thanks for the info and speedy response, Catherine. In answer to your question, it would be ideal if all the options you mentioned were available (viz.- by user or by transaction or by type of transaction, or all of these options). Based on the Journal Report (in the role of financial adviser), it should be possible to view the info by user. As such, producing a report with all related/relevant information. Then customizing it if/when necessary.

Presently, it appear that the workaround solution would be to export to excel and manipulate the data.
Permalink Reply by adempster on February 8, 2011 at 7:51

Hi Earl and Catherine

IMHO it is a real pity that a serious professional product like XERO which is beautiful in concept and has cost a lot of money to build nevertheless continues indisputably (as far as I can tell) to comprehensively fail, after years of development, by giving users neither a properly conceived, integrated audit trail nor any comprehensive, integrated data export facility (plus its import facilities are also sadly handicapped) - see the other posts on this also. 

 

Why XERO avoids this puzzles me...... but then from my experience when you look closely at software performance via access to comprehensive data exports and audit trails the end-user is enabled to identify and prove when any errors in their figures arise from software glitches (which are of course inevitable in complex online systems) and this can be embarrassing for the software vendor. ... maybe this is the real reason - certainly I have not come across any mention of error rates in this software but most certainly the real world data error rate will not be Zero! (pun and double entendre intended!)

Alec Dempster

Permalink Reply by Jimmy Bailey on February 24, 2012 at 2:15

Yes very frustrating. I'm a business owner and need to be able to log in and see what our accountant has done each day. It makes it impossible to supervise. 

Permalink Reply by Heather Smith on February 28, 2012 at 1:19

Glad to see this has been raised, and yes I would like to be able to access a detailed audit report, so I am aware of who has entered what, both by transaction date, and date entered.

Permalink Reply by Catherine (Xero) on March 7, 2012 at 22:07

At the moment the journal report mentioned above is the most thorough record but we are working on something to consolidate the history & notes currently written across the app, which will include more history items in time as we introduce them.

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