deleting

[Dale Alspach]

What some accounting software allows is the deleting/revising of
transactions and other entries from the normally visible registers, but
all of the  time stamped versions of a transaction are secretly kept in
the audit trail along with any time stamped deletion. For example
 QuickBooks Pro has an optional
audit trail. Essentially an audit trail is like a log which could be
played back to reconstruct the state of the books at any moment. (It
is slightly coarser than a keystroke history since only committed
transactions are recorded.)

I had it turned on (in QuickBooks Pro) for the last fiscal year for an
organization that I help, and then tried to use it to clear up some
oddities at the end of the year. I found that searching the audit
trail was difficult and that I was always getting either way too much
information or not enough.

I think that having an audit trail available for gnucash will be
important for its adoption by some businesses. Larger business
might also need some type of login so that the audit trail would
also show who made which changes. QuickBooks Pro has been around
a while and the fact that its implementation is not very
satisfactory indicates that doing audit trails well may require a
lot of careful planning.

Dale Alspach