By Stephanie Elsen

If you are a Red Wing Software customer, chances are you know the benefits of a good audit trail. That’s because this feature has always been a top priority for our payroll and accounting software over the years.

A good audit trail can help prevent and detect fraud. Being able to see every action within your system by user can help you monitor their activity. If users know their activity is monitored, they are much less likely to commit fraudulent activity.

A good audit trail enables you to provide necessary documentation for third party organizations (such as banks and investors) that require it.

A good audit trail helps reconstruct events once an issue is detected.

Having a good audit trail in your accounting software provides peace of mind, knowing that events are being recorded by user and that information can be accessed anytime to look back at the history to solve problems.

Internal Controls have been a big buzz phrase in the accounting industry for the last several years. Part of having good internal software controls is to have a good audit trail. Without an audit trail, it is difficult to hold your employees accountable when they make errors, or worse, when fraudulent transactions have been entered.

For companies that have multiple employees entering and editing transactions in accounting and business software, it is important to know who added a transaction and when it was posted. If you don’t have that information, how can you hold employees accountable?

A good audit trail system should include the following features:

• Keeps a user record for each transaction entered into the system.
• Keeps the date and time of each transaction entry.
• When a transaction is edited the system maintains a record of the original transaction.
• The new edited transaction record must contain the user that edited it along with the date and time it was edited.
• Ability to track the history of edited records, when multiple edits have been processed.
• If the system allows checks and invoices to be reprinted the system must keep a record of who reprinted the documents, the date, time and the number of times the documents have been reprinted and any original information that was changed.
• The ability to prevent duplicate numbers for checks and customer invoices.