The audit log

What this does

Settings → Audit Log is the record of changes to the shop's important tables: work orders and their items, invoices and their items, payments, customers, vehicles and other assets, vendors, journal entries and lines, checks and card transactions, bill payments, inventory parts and transactions, and the chart of accounts. Each row has the Timestamp, the User, the Table, the Action (Created, Updated, Deleted, or Posted anyway), and the Changes: for an update, the fields that changed with old and new values.

Before you start

settings.audit_log (Owner, General Manager). Know roughly when and which record; the log is long.

Steps

Filter by Table (the filter offers the most common ones; All Tables includes the rest, such as checks, card transactions, vendors, and assets) and Action, then page through. Read the Changes column for the field-level diff. A Posted anyway row is a duplicate override: someone was told a transaction was already on the books and posted it regardless, and the row records what it matched.

Edits to posted checks and card transactions (see Editing and voiding posted transactions) write their before-and-after values and the reason here; that's where to look when a register amount changed and nobody remembers why.

Common problems

A change I know happened isn't here. Only the tables above are audited. Most settings changes, message sends, and document edits aren't.

Old rows say Estimate (legacy). Estimates became a band of work orders; historical entries keep their original label.

The User is blank. The change was made by a scheduled job or an integration, not a signed-in person.