Audit Trails: Key for Business Decision Making?

Audit Trail

The word ‘audit’ is first associated with a paper documentation request,  to be reviewed, and analysed by the audit department on an ongoing basis or in case of fraud or abnormal activities. Now, most organisations are reliant on digital strategy audits. Essentially, these are linked directly to software, IT infrastructure, actions on data in an electronic format meaning all data and evidence has to be certified by different methods. It is a process of documenting the audit trail.

 

What is an audit trail and why are they essential for decision making?

An audit trail is a record of every action, event, or activity between a user/ system and the data. It can link to entry, alteration and deletion of records, or a sequence of automated systemactions. The daily capacity of audit logs can range from hundreds to thousands based on company size, making it very difficult to track. Therefore, a solution or automated tracking process is necessary to have.

The audit trail is crucial for any organisation:

  • Security- audit trails provide a transparent view of business activities and allow you to make data-driven decisions with an overview of the business activity with an understanding of any fraudulent activity. In any case, keeping track of all activities without a sophisticated software is difficult as it is time-consuming and costly.

Data breaches – with every year passed, cyber criminals are becoming more innovative and more resourceful. Working with complex data, whether that be personal data or bank data, is highly sensitive.

 

What are the benefits of keeping thorough audit trails?

The ability to follow records from their source documentation through their business cycle provides a range of benefits, including transparency and defence for compliance, recording integrity and accuracy and the security of sensitive and vital information.

Audit logs do this work by holding individual users responsible for their input with a record, recreating the actions that occur in its trail, detecting interference and suspicious behaviour, and recognising system application issues and system/operative errors.

 

What features does entity management software offer for auditing?

Sonas provides complete documentation, evidence and tracking of the source documentation in the data capturing process through to our reporting module to provide clear transparency of data in real-time. Sonas provides:

  • Storage of cash cycles and documents by unique numbers.
  • Full tracking of any editing to recorded cash cycles.
  • Control of editing through user types.
  • Tracking creation and editing — i.e., who did what to which file?

Rollback to previous versions of a document.

 

Sonas transparent audit trails

Sonas’ reconciliation software offers several secure, sophisticated and affordable solutions to many of the difficulties pinpointed.

Our data management records all of your company data relating to reconciliation and logs all alterations made for auditing and reporting purposes. Our solution ensures you have full transparency of your cash cycle for data-driven decision making and real-time analytics.