Why You Need an Audit Trail

Every industry needs and uses audit trails to track events that occur during transactions. For example:

• When healthcare providers communicate with healthcare insurers, they track the services provided for billing purposes.

• Businesses selling a product, track the items from the factory, to warehouse distribution, to delivery to a customer.

• Or a bank that processes payments from one person (or agency) to another, tracks that the money was available before it was sent, and that it was received.

Each of these business-types make many transactions in a day. Each transaction has a life-cycle consisting of least one, and in most cases multiple data-points (called events) that occur, and must be completed in order for the transaction to conclude. The data-points (or events) that begin and conclude a transaction are a business process. Often but not always, the events occur in a sequential order. The life-cycle of the process should be auditable (i.e. logged, recorded, and analyzed) to determine if the process was interrupted at any point.

An event that can be audited in this way, is called an Audit Event.

See A Single Transaction Event Explained for more information.