This post is a follow-up to my mentioning the Field-Level Audit feature in a previous post (click here). I also recently noticed that Sergey blogged about this back in January 2013 (click here).
The Field-Level Audit feature allows you to track changes to any field on any screen (I haven’t actually tried this on all fields on all screens, but this seems to be the case). This can help your company comply with Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, or just give you better visibility into change log history on some of your data.
Where I think this feature is especially useful is on screens that are used to maintain your master level records. Master level records are things like Customers, Vendors, Purchase Orders, Items, etc. Many times it’s important to know what information changed on a record and when. This is where Field-Level Auditing can help.
How do I use it?
Basically, all you have to do is open up a screen, let’s take Vendors (AP303000) for example, and click Help –> Audit History… in the upper right-hand corner.
The first time you do this, you will get a message about needing to enable the feature on the screen. All you have to do is click the Enable Field Level Audit button.
Once you do this, you will be taken to the Audit (SM205510) screen where you can decide which specific fields you want to track. There is some amount of computing cost associated with auditing fields since Acumatica has to be constantly monitoring the fields and then it has to take up space in the database in order to store the audit information. So, you only want to audit fields that you actually care about. It’s probably a bad idea to turn on auditing for every field on every screen. Just pick the fields that you care about.
In some cases is might be tricky to decide which fields are the ones that you want because the field names in the Audit (SM205510) screen are usually different than the field names on the screen that you want to audit, Vendors (AP303000) for example. I think there is an easy way to determine which fields are which by using the Customization feature. I tried this out on a number of different fields and it seems to work. Rather than try to explain how to do this, I think it’s easier to show in a video.