What is an Audit Trail?

By tracking access and alterations, audit trails ensure compliance, maintain data integrity, enhance security, resolve disputes, and drive continuous improvement.

What's the Purpose of an Audit Trail?

Audit trails are a tool for ensuring authenticity and trustworthiness, by facilitating transparency, accountability, and risk management – continually providing information on who accessed specific documentation, how they used it, and when it happened.

Digitisation

Digitally filed documents are the most effective and controllable document management solution, with data security considerably enhanced by BS-10008 compliant audit trails. BS-10008 compliance covers all aspects of the digitisation process to give your digital documents legal admissibility.

The BS-10008 audit trail includes essential details such as document selection, authorisation, scanning, delivery, verification, quality control, and destruction of the original document.

Document Management

When a file is stored in an Document Management system, metadata is generated – recording information like the creation date, modification dates, user engagement, and document type for just a few examples.

As users interact with a document, the audit trail creates version histories by linking changes in the content with metadata. Version histories display how the document has changed over time, and records who has changed it.

Workflow Audit Trails

A workflow audit trail tracks the movement of information throughout an organisation, recording how automatic processes are contributing to outcomes, as well as making it easier to identify potential bottlenecks.

This practice displays that information is being handled compliantly, and provides transparency, accountability, and control over operations.

What are the Benefits of Audit Trails?

Compliance and Security Response

An audit trail that follows international compliancy standards ensures that your documents are legally admissible, and that the necessary protocols are put in place to quickly identify breaches, unauthorised access, fraudulent behaviour, or information misuse.

Audit trails also enable organisations to take direct and targeted actions in response to security breaches, such as informing relevant parties of the source of the violation to mitigate the impact.

Retention

Audit trails play a crucial role in retention; helping you to easily search for documents, track schedule changes, and recover misplaced files.

When paired with the advanced searching capabilities of Document Management, documents can be grouped by retention length or destruction date, and can be updated simultaneously if there are any changes to data privacy law.

Analysis & Process Improvement

With audit trails, organisations are better-equipped to improve process improvement.

This is because audit trails generate live dynamic reports to provide valuable insights for system analysis; such as identifying outcomes of certain processes and potential for bottlenecks, so that targeted changes can be implemented effectively.

Advanced Searching

Audit trails make it easier for your people to locate the files they need, when they need them, since they allow for advanced searching and grouping based on metadata.

Truth and Transparency

Keeping an audit trail provides you with a detailed record of a document’s lifecycle – giving you access to any past versions, thus meeting the criteria for making digital documents credible and legally admissible.

Easy Auditing

Having a simple process overview simplifies internal and external audits, allowing you to be reactive to subject access requests.

Creating an Audit Trail that works for you

Document Management systems that record user interactions are vital in the development of effective digital transformation strategies, because they generate valuable metadata.

By continually capturing relevant data points through the document lifecycle, Audit Trails also make it much easier for you to identify patterns, detect anomalies, and make informed decisions regarding process optimisation, compliance adherence, and resource allocation.

Once you’ve established a metadata framework that aligns with your business, goals, and regulatory requirements, you position yourself to take full advantage of Document Management; with features like system analysis, KPI reporting, and advanced searching all contributing to document best practices, whilst making it easier for teams to collaborate effectively.

Compliant Audit Trails

Designed to evolve alongside the needs of your business, our solutions capture audit data at each interaction – allowing us to verify that data is being handled appropriately, consistently, and accurately throughout the process.

For a free our solutions capture audit data at each interaction – allowing us to verify that data is being handled appropriately, consistently, and accurately throughout the process.

What to Expect from Apogee Audit Trails

Ongoing monitoring throughout each stage of the digitisation process to ensure compliance
Comprehensive progress reports on demand, with accurate forecasting on ETAs
Informed guidance for what to do with poor-quality documentation

For a free consultation with our digital transformation experts, contact us today by using the form below!

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