Transcript
The audit journal: every change, who made it and from which device, how to filter it, and how to check it has not been tampered with.
0:00 Introduction
The audit journal is the system's memory. Every sale, every discount, every price change, and every sign-in action is written down. In this episode we find out who did what, and how to be sure that nobody changed the record.
0:15 The journal
Scroll the menu on the left, and open Audit journal.
The page says that the journal is append only. That means entries are only ever added, and never edited or deleted.
Each row is one thing that happened, newest first. You see its sequence number, the time, the action, who did it, and who approved it, if a manager had to. Then the register, and the source, which is either a POS register, or the server.
0:43 One entry in detail
Click a row to open it. We pick a completed sale.
The side panel shows the time on the register's clock, and the time the server received it. They differ when a register sells offline. Below are the user, the register, the entity, and the data of the entry, such as the receipt number and the total.
Two buttons jump to the sale itself, or to every entry for that sale. At the bottom is a hash, a long fingerprint of this entry. We come back to it in a moment. Close the panel.
1:15 Finding what you need
There are many entries, so use the filters. You can filter by date, staff member, register, outlet, the kind of action, and the source. Let's look at the actions.
The actions are grouped. Cart, sales, payments, the cash drawer, price changes, offline periods, shifts, reprinted receipts, and more. Choose Sales.
Now only the sales are listed. Next, the staff filter. We choose Casey Cashier, to see what one person did.
You can also type words in the search box, or paste a sale id into the next box, to follow one sale from the first item to the payment. The View audit trail button on a sale does exactly that.
2:00 Is it trustworthy?
How do you know that nobody has changed the journal? Tap Verify integrity.
The system recomputes the whole chain. Every entry stores a fingerprint of its contents plus the fingerprint of the entry before it. Change or remove any past entry, and the chain breaks from that point on. Here, every entry matches.
The information button next to Refresh explains how the journal works, in more detail.
And Export CSV saves what you see as a spreadsheet, for your accountant or an investigator.
That is the audit log. In the next episode, we use it to watch for voids, refunds and overrides, and look at sales that were rung up offline.