Identifying consituent record changes

Christine Gingerick:

I'm trying to identify changes made to a constituent record by a specific user.  I can identify records "last changed by", but is there a way to identify which fields a user may have changed?  Ideally I'd like to see what field was changed by this user and what date the change was made.  Even MORE ideally I would be able to see what the field was before the change and what it was changed to.


Thanks everyone!

Alan French: We're currently looking at purchasing the Audit Trail plug-in from Zeidman Development, which would enable you to do all of this. We have a demonstration scheduled with them for next week so that we can see the functionality offered by the different versions available.

 

Alan French:

Christine Gingerick:

I'm trying to identify changes made to a constituent record by a specific user.  I can identify records "last changed by", but is there a way to identify which fields a user may have changed?  Ideally I'd like to see what field was changed by this user and what date the change was made.  Even MORE ideally I would be able to see what the field was before the change and what it was changed to.


Thanks everyone!

We're currently looking at purchasing the Audit Trail plug-in from Zeidman Development, which would enable you to do all of this. We have a demonstration scheduled with them for next week so that we can see the functionality offered by the different versions available.

 

Hi Alan,


I don't think so. At the time when we were purchasing there was no Validatrix (unless in David's head ) and I can't remember whether there was an option for basic vs professional. It was in 2012. We had no option really as we were coming from a system which had a good auditing functionality (there was no fundraising module in it just CRM) and having over 100 users accessing RE on a daily basis we needed the Audit Trail. The thing with this type of tool is that you may not need it for a month or a year until you really need it because some critical data issue, but then it's too late because it can't audit historical changes.


What I like about Validatrix and its query converter is that you can create a query selecting specific data set representing a specific issue and with two clicks convert it to a rule with a real-time validation to prevent mistakes from happening.  


Any questions feel free to ask


Tom

Jill Freidmutter:

I just clicked on your link. I'm a Community Forum member but don't see anywhere to vote. Do I need to register? 

 

Our demo got pushed back due to scheduling issues at our end, but we eventually went ahead with it yesterday; I'm pretty certain we're going to look at getting at least the Basic version. I would love the Professional version as it covers a lot more (potentially more important!) types of record and comes with Validatrix, as Tom mentioned, which could take a lot of data cleansing work off my plate by preventing bad data getting into the system in the first place. The only reason we may not go for Pro would be budget.


I like the ability to filter the list of changes by user (amongst other things). At the moment I find it difficult to identify specific training needs, as I may suspect that somebody is doing something because their name frequently appears in the "last changed by" property of the affected records but I can't actually be sure that it was them. I can definitely see myself using Audit Trail to run off a list of phone numbers updated by Joe Bloggs in the last month, for example, to see what the accuracy is like.


Not directly related to the Audit Trail product, but I have to say that I've been very impressed with the helpfulness and friendliness of everyone I've spoken to at Zeidman Development so far