I was prompted to write this after seeing a tweet highlighting Altru’s history function. The tweet pointed to the Blackbaud Know How article about how you can see who changed what and when on a record. For those of you unfamiliar with Altru, it is one of the more recent applications released on the Infinity platform.

One of the more well thought out aspects of the Infinity platform was the fact that every change is audited. For each table in the Infinity database there is a corresponding audit table that stores the history of changes in that table. The changes happen on the database level. Whenever a change is made from whatever process the change (including deletions and additions) are recorded in the audit table.

The Raiser’s Edge 7 was always criticised for not have such a feature. The best it could do was show the date the main record was changed and by who as well as when it was first created and by who. This lack of functionality prompted me to develop Audit Trail for The Raiser’s Edge.  It works in a similar way whenever a change is made it is stored in the audit table. Unfortunately this is done on the client side and not on the server at the database level. This means that some processes that do not use the VBA module will not be captured by the audit trail. (We do have a global audit utility as a work around to this). However it works well but it is a piece of functionality that many say should have been there from the start.