Audit trail
In accounting, audit trail means the immutable record of every state change.
- Layer
- Lexicon
- Defined in
- Lexicon
- Components
- 3
Authority
This definition follows Internal control — SOX §404.
Every citation in this system, with the text we read and the date we checked it, is in US GAAP and where these rules come from.
The lesson that teaches this
Accounting, 0 to 1 — a free course taught end to end on one month of one company, with the spreadsheet exercises to work it yourself.
Audit trail, in use
Quoted from the 10 documents that use the word — what it does to an interface, in the spec's own sentence.
The audit trail is a first-class view on every object, not a hidden admin log.
The approval inbox, the mobile approve, the audit trail.
Everything: full amounts, FX detail if converted, attachments, the categorization rule that fired, the full audit trail with actor and timestamp.
For founders
The same idea written for a founder: what it costs a startup that ignores it, and what to do in a real month.
- Audit trailA permanent record of every entry: who made it, when, why, and the document behind it.
- Can you vibe code your startup’s accounting?AI coding tools build a finance dashboard in an afternoon, but not a closed, reconciled, GAAP-basis ledger. Where the line is, and how to stay inside it.
- What to put on an invoice: a field-by-field guideThe fields a B2B invoice needs to get paid on time: legal names, a numbering sequence, dates, terms, tax lines, PO and remit-to, and how to fix one.
What it is not called
Each of these is a real word for a different thing. Using it here is what makes a product read as though it was built by someone who has not done the work.
- history
- log
Components that render this
The concept is not documentation-only. These are the components that name it in their specification, grouped and stated exactly as the catalog states them.
5Ledger & tables
Family spec9Accounting core (GL)
Family spec12Close, controls & consolidation
Family specAlso in Controls
Work with this concept
The calculators that compute it and the ledger payloads that carry it. A definition is where a reader starts; these are where they go next.
Defined in Lexicon. This page is generated from that document, so the two cannot disagree.