Using the Audit Trail and its Tools

An Audit Trail is simply a detailed log of every financial transaction in your business. Please refer to Chapter 17.1 What is an Audit Trail and Journal? for more detailed background information.

Accessing the Audit Trail

Start the General Ledger Manager.
Double click Audit Trail under Reports at the bottom of the treeview, or
Highlight Audit Trail and click the right side summary hyperlink.

Using the Audit Trail

Start Date: Use this tool to set the starting date for the Audit Trail period you want to see. When the Audit Tail first opens it defaults to showing all Audit Trail activity for the previous week. This is simply to keep the amount of data displayed manageable.
End Date: Use this tool to set the ending date for the Audit Trail period you want to see.
Create - Use this tool to create the Audit Trail after setting the Start and End Dates.
Analyze - Use this tool to toggle Analyze mode on and off. When Analyze mode is active, the Audit Trail entries are grouped by transaction, with balancing totals after each transaction. If for some unthinkable reason an unbalanced entry was written, it would appear red. See the picture below showing the Analyze mode Active.
Print - Use the print tools to print or print preview the active Audit Trail.
Export - Use this tool to export the active Audit Trail to a file.

The Audit Trail's date column displays the date and time to the millisecond when the transaction was posted.
The Account is the GL Account number which was line written to.
The Description is the software's description of the line. Its descriptive enough to allow you to determine where the line came from.
The last two columns display the amount in the left or right column where the entry was posted.
The Balancing Totals at the bottom of the Audit Trail are only there to prove the totals balance; they mean nothing more. Nor should they agree with the balancing totals from the Trial Balance (Unless you try to create an Audit Trail from the first day you used the software! But do NOT try that - the list could take an awful LONG time to download.)

Using the Audit Trail and its Tools

Background

Accessing the Audit Trail

Using the Audit Trail