One of the most common questions we get is ‘who did what?’. Usually this comes about in situations such as ‘the big customer’ complains of an improper billing and everyone wants to know, ‘Who is responsible for this?’ And of course, there are many, far less dramatic situations which will invariably come up where you need to be able to audit all changes made to a particular piece of information.
Standard: Last Revision Standard equipment with SAFE is the ability to track the Last Revision Date, Last Revision Time, and Last Revised By for most records such as Customers, Products, Sales Orders, A/P Bills, etc. For example, you can easily view the last time a Customer was edited and who made the change from the Customer Browse. In the same way, you can review the last person to edit an A/P Bill (usually this would be right before a payment was made against the Bill.)
Track Exactly Who Did What, When!
Optional Equipment is our TransLog SAFExtension, which keeps a running audit trail of various transactions and records (which you specify). For example, you can specify that you wish to track ‘who did what’ for all aspects of the Sales Order process, but not track edits to Product Specs. A complete set of reports is included which allows the manager to track changes to specific tables or even down to a single transaction. For example, this gives you the ability to list every time a Sales Order was edited and by whom, from creation, through billing and payment.
No Free Lunch! TransLog has two costs. The first, of course, is the price: a measly $299.00. Custom reports may be added at our normal design charge, or you can create them yourself in ReportWriter. The second cost is in horsepower: as you might imagine, logging all these actions in such a detailed way would increase database activity on your server. You’re right! And in fact, if you go wild and elect to log all activity in SAFE, you will probably notice a performance drop of %30-40%. For more common applications, the performance hit is a more modest 10%-15%. Smaller, but still significant. So you may want to consider doing all the normal things we suggest for improving performance: Faster server hard disk, faster network cards, network switches instead of hubs, etc.
Conclusion As your business grows, the ability to track transactions and record updates in a comprehensive way becomes more and more important. TransLog gives you this capability at a bargain price, with the caveat that your hardware be powerful enough to support the added disk activity. Of course, for the majority of you wh o will most benefit from this SAFExtension, this level of hardware should be in place.
