What a treat! Last week, I was one lucky ducky and was invited on a road trip with my good buddy Murph, to go see our friends Laura and Victor Madeira. I have made this trip from Oklahoma City to Dallas a few times over the years to visit them during their Woodard Group.
Learning from your peers just makes sense. In this industry, we have similar situations with our clients. Sharing our accounting and QuickBooks knowledge helps us to be better prepared to deal with them. From a purely academic view, learning tips and tricks and even do's and don’ts save us from wasted time and even failed engagements; and from an emotional view, just knowing you’re not alone is comforting.
The Dallas Woodard Group meeting covered great information, and one of the main topics was about what the QBO Audit Log does and doesn’t do.
What a timely and important conversation. As fraud is more and more rampant, it is important to understand the abilities and even shortfalls of the software we use and recommend.
Let’s start off with my favorite backup tool for QuickBooks Online, ChronoBooks. Whenever, engaging with a client and asked to make changes to the data, I use this backup tool to create a 'go back to' point but… one thing to note is ChronoBooks does not backup the audit log (Murph is going to give you an explanation of why at the end of my discussion). It does however, give us the ability to copy any backup and see a prior version of the data.
Meaningful Reports
By using the audit log reports, lots of information can be gathered and viewed. There are a few ways I often use the audit log:
The Audit Log Center
1) From the Gear Icon, select Audit Log
2) Filter
3) Select user
4) Choose type of transactions to view
5) Optional, narrow down to view only deleted or voided transaction
Liz_Audit-log_01
6) Once the list is created select transaction to view user and date changes
7) Changes are highlighted
8) Multiple changes are highlighted
9) The original create date and user are visible as well as any indirect changes (reconciling is an example of an indirect edit)
Liz_Audit-log_02
The Search Window
1) Select advanced search and add a filter for date modified
Liz_Audit-log_03
Individual Transaction
1) Select More in the bottom bar and view audit log
Liz_Audit-log_04
Printing Limits
But in a case of fraud or suspicious activity, viewing the QuickBooks Online audit log is a good tool. And in my opinion, easier to target changes than QuickBooks Desktop; but... there are limits. One of the big limits is the printing of the audit log. While you can pull the activity and view it on the screen, it is not easy to print. The big issue is, only the first 300 lines can be printed.
Highlighted Changes
Another awesome feature in the QBO audit log is the ability to view the changes details. If there is a particular transaction in question, by drilling down into the original transaction you can see who, when and the original status of its creation. Each change made afterward to the transaction is also visible with a date and user stamp. Changes made to the transaction are highlighted in yellow, which makes them clearly visible on screen. Another area to note, these highlighted changes are not visible when you print. Resulting in a confusing printed version of the changes.
The Work Around
So why does printing matter? Fraud happens. Documented proof helps in determining whether guilty or incessant. There are a number of scenarios in which proof needs to be printed, a court of law being one example. Currently the work around is using a screen capture tool to view an unedited version of the transaction. As you can imagine, this is painstakingly slow work, resulting a huge paper stack.
We are never excited to hunt for fraud because it is messy and costly; but by attending the Woodard class, I learned a few tips.
Post-script by Murph
First let me say, it was 'my pleasure' riding with Liz and her daughter to Dallas, it would have been a difficult trip for me to make 'on my own' (these days), and I am more than grateful for her willingness to 'be my driver.'
Now to the topic of the QuickBooks Online API. Intuit's QuickBooks Development team has been working on a total revision of the API for QBO for some time, but at present a lot of the data utilities are still using the API that has existed for the past four or five years. Unfortunately, that QuickBooks API does not make all areas of the accounting data available, so there are a defined set of tables, views and stored procedures available to developers.
The QuickBooks 'Audit Log' does not have a 'table,' or a 'view,' or a 'stored procedure' available under the API. It is a compiled report which the application produces at the users request based upon a wide variety of data available via the 'internal API,' which is not presently available via queries called externally.
While a number of applications can pull QuickBooks tables and essentially pull all of the data that would be used to produce an 'Audit Log,' when the data is replicated in an external source, the data is recorded 'as of the date it is replicated,' not as of the original date it is written to the original tables in QuickBooks Online. From a forensic standpoint, this means that the data is worthless for legal reporting purposes.
Similarly, tools that (at present) can produce a mirrored copy of a QBO file, even in a new QBO file, actually produce a file in which the recorded 'write date' (not the transaction date) reflects the date upon which the transaction was created as of the 'mirror copy date' rather than the original transaction creation date. Again, this leaves the data essentially 'unworthy' of forensic value from a legal studies standpoint.
The Audit Log is used to look at 'what has been changed that potentially should not have been changed,' but if you have the ability to restore data to the point prior to the changes that should not have been made, then you have evidence of what has changed simply by the existence in the data that is different.
But also remember, the ability to restore a valuable backup you control isn't only about forensics, it's about the integrity of your financial data. While such data may be of little 'legal case value' it is not without significant 'fiscal value.' Back in August of 2016, I wrote about a QBO Worst Case Scenario citing the need for use of a QBO Backup program that users could control. At that time, 'SafetyNet' was the only such program. Today, multiple 'user controlled' back-up solutions exist for QBO, and I wrote an APP COMPARE article covering those just a couple of months ago.