Everything done on the account: by whom, when, and to what.
What it is for
Answering after the fact. "Who stopped this campaign?", "since when has this member had access to contact details?", "why did my cap change on Tuesday?" have no answer anywhere else.
It is also what lets you prove traceability of your access to personal data, if you are asked.
How to use it
- Filter by type before reading. With no filter, an active account's history runs to hundreds of lines.
- A system action has no author. A stop for zero balance or a scheduled restart is nobody's doing: the line carries the reason, not a name.
- What is logged about personal data is it LEAVING, not it being displayed. A lead export is logged, with its author and its volume, as is revealing an IP address. Simply viewing contact details on screen is not: decrypting them at render time would produce one line per lead per page load, noise that would bury the consultations that matter.
- The history cannot be erased. Not even by an administrator: a log you can clean proves nothing.
Step by step: tracing a change
- Find the approximate date of the change you noticed.
- Filter on the action type (campaign, member, billing) rather than scrolling everything.
- Read the author. A member's name means a human decision; a line with no author, an automatic consequence whose reason is written beside it.
- Open the line to see the before and after of the changed field.
- If it is data leaving (an export, an IP reveal), note the date: that is what you will be asked for if a prospect complains. To find out who merely viewed a record on screen, the history cannot answer.