data change auditing

[photon]

I had one of our head budgeting people bring me a question the other day and I feel awkward that I didn't know how to answer him.

He loaded data. He validated his 100k. The following day, he sees it's 75k. Neither of us has any idea how to tell who entered the data.

He emailed the group of users who have security access to that data and one user confirmed that she had in fact submitted the updated number but... we did have to ask.

Have I just lucked out and gone years without needing to do this so have become blind to a whole auditing feature I didn't know was there all along? Or, is it that recording per-cell auditing for every single edit is just impractical and there really is no way for us to do this? I don't see questions about it in Community. I don't even see any particularly relevant products/labels for this question! So, I'm at a bit of a loss. What don't I know that I don't know?

Edit: I do see a mention in the Foundation Handbook that data auditing is there and can be used to find the hypothetical 2% adjustment that a manager entered but there's not a single other reference to it in the book. Certainly, I can track down a lot of other activity like WF imports and data management job executions but if it were done via an xfsetcell or just submitting a quickview...?

[JackLacava]

In the Standard Application Reports there is a relevant report, I think it's called Data Entry or something like that. It should report any data-entry performed with standard features (forms etc), at cell level.

If data is modified through a custom business rule, then the run won't appear there - but you can check BR runs in Task Activity, and audit when rules are modified.

[photon]

I did look at that report but mine is blank (excepting a single currency code displayed in the middle of the page for no reason?) and says it's grouped by WF profile... which wouldn't be applicable in this case. So, I'm not sure if the report is malfunctioning or if it's just smarter than I am.

[Saveen]

Hi Jack, 
We are on version 6.5 (server hosted). One of the data source rules changed and we have no way to trace it back. Nobody in the team changed it. We tried looking under task activity, but it does not show any business rule changes. Would you know any another way on how we can audit trace BR changes?

[JackLacava]

[Saveen]

Thanks so much Jack, this is quite helpful. However, this does not show any changes that were made to data sources. Maybe because data sources changes are not captured under Business rules? I am trying to trace any recent changes made here - 

[JackLacava]

Changes to the actual Connector rules are definitely captured:

Changes to the DataSource properties are probably visible in another report, or at worst from these tables:

[EricOsmanski · Accepted solution]

You can right click on the cell and select Drill Down. From the drill down menu, you can get information about the cell by right clicking on the row and selecting Cell Status.

If it is not a base intersection, you can right click on the row and select All Aggregated Data Below Cell to view all of the records which aggregated into that row. On the bottom pane, you can then right click and still get the Cell Status or get audit results:

[photon]

Every intersection I've drilled down on has the Audit History selection disabled.

[EricOsmanski]

If you are at base level intersection, what is the Cell Status? Can you screenshot that?

[photon]

Ugh. How annoying. I must have just picked a string of inapplicable intersections to check because as soon as I went to check one for this screenshot, it gave me the Audit option and, sure enough, I can see the associated user.

So, it's a bit obscure but at least I can demo it to the budget admin. Thanks!