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GLOSSARY

What is an audit trail?

DEFINITION

An audit trail is a chronological record of who did what, when and to which record, kept so changes can be reviewed and explained.

Also called: Audit log, Change log

How it works

Each entry captures the actor (a user, a service or an AI agent), the action, the target record, the time and ideally the values before and after. Audit trails support internal controls, external audits and incident investigations. Strong ones are append-only and tamper-evident, can be searched and exported, and are retained for a defined period.

Example

An auditor asks why a vendor's bank details changed in March. The audit trail shows the change, the user who made it, the approval that allowed it and the previous value.

In integrations

Writes into a customer's ledger need the same accountability. Unify Int is designed to log every create, update and delete with the actor, before-and-after values and the platform's response, including writes made by agents through Unify Agents (MCP). Retention and export options vary by plan; see Permissions & Audit. Finance teams and auditors expect to trace every change to their books. Without an audit trail, a software vendor that writes into ledgers becomes an unexplained source of entries, which is a hard conversation in an audit.

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