The audit log

A customer rings to say the rate on an invoice is not what was agreed. Somebody moved a deal to Won that was not won. A tax rate changed and nobody in the office will say when. The audit log is where you go with those questions. It sits at Settings › Audit, it cannot be edited from anywhere in the product, and it holds one row for every change the server was told to record.

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It is not a complete record of everything that happens. Three hundred and thirty places in JAI CRM write an audit row, and a good many things that feel like events write nothing at all. This page says exactly which is which, because knowing what the log does not hold is worth more at four o’clock on a Friday than assuming it holds everything.

Who can open it

The Audit log row only appears in the Settings menu for somebody whose role grants it. Everyone else does not see the row, and the server refuses the request even if they reach the address directly.

A role given the whole Settings module with Manage gets both View and Export on the audit log without the Audit row being ticked separately. That is worth knowing before you hand somebody Settings so they can fix a numbering series.

What a row shows

The table is newest first and cannot be sorted; the column headings are not clickable. Each page holds 50 rows.

The Who column is a snapshot, not a link. The name is copied into the row when it is written, so a person who has since left the business, or who has since changed their name, still reads as they were on the day. Several of the names in that column are not members of staff at all:

• The system — background work. The nightly job that marks a dormant vendor inactive, and the job that makes one active again when it starts trading, both sign their rows The system.
• Schedule — a recurring invoice run, or a customer subscription raising its next invoice.
• API key: Tally bridge — an integration acting through an API key. The visible name is the key’s; underneath, the row is stored against whoever created that key, falling back to the owner of the business if that person has since left. Anything reading the stored actor rather than the name will therefore show a named member of staff for work no person did.
• Razorpay (online) — an invoice settled through an online payment gateway, signed with the gateway’s name.
• Sunil Deshmukh (share link) — a quotation or other document accepted or declined through a public share link, signed with the name the customer typed in.
• System, on its own, is none of these. It is what the screen prints for a row that carries no name at all.

Narrowing it down

Above the table, every filter is optional and they combine. Each list offers only what your own log holds, with how many entries each has.

Export downloads exactly the rows the filters keep, with columns for who, done by, module, record, what happened, the summary and the IP address. Clear filters puts everything back.

Opening one row

Click any row and a panel opens. Its title is the summary line; under it sits the name and the time, and below that a Field / Before / After table of what changed. The before value is struck through; the after value is not. If no field-level detail was captured the panel says so, which is common — 283 of the 330 write sites record a summary and nothing more.

Field names in that table are the database column names, not the labels on your forms. You will see amountDue, placeOfSupply, gstin, ownerId. Four record types are the exception — project tasks, inventory items, expense bills and employee records label their changes in plain English (Status, Due date, Assignee), because those routes hand the module’s own field labels to the comparison. A change of owner shows two long identifiers rather than two people’s names, because the column holds the identifier.

Worked example

Deshpande Engineering Works, Pune, raises invoice INV-2026-0418 to Kirloskar Pneumatic Co. for 40 bearing housings at ₹6,200 each: ₹2,48,000 taxable, CGST 9% and SGST 9% of ₹22,320 each, ₹2,92,640 in total. Two weeks later the customer’s accounts team queries the amount. Anita Kulkarni, who runs operations, opens the audit log.

1. Go to Settings › Audit.
2. Type INV-2026-0418 into Search what happened or who. The list narrows to the rows whose summary mentions that number.
3. Three rows come back: Created invoice INV-2026-0418, Updated invoice INV-2026-0418, and Invoice INV-2026-0418: draft → sent.
4. Click the Update row. The panel is titled Updated invoice INV-2026-0418, and under it reads Rohit Jadhav · 14 Mar 2026, 16:42. The From column showed the office IP.

The panel lists what moved. Amounts appear as bare numbers, without a currency symbol or thousands separators, because that is how the column stores them:

Anita now knows who, when, and that ₹16,000 came off the taxable value. She goes back to Rohit with the figures rather than a suspicion.

What gets recorded

• Records created, changed, deleted, restored and permanently deleted, across CRM, sales, purchase, inventory, projects, finance, quality, manufacturing, documents and any module you built yourself.
• Status moves — a quotation sent, a sales or purchase document moved on, a vendor made active or inactive. Those five carry a proper before-and-after on the status field. A manufacturing order confirmed, released, started, completed or cancelled, a quality inspection settled, a package delivered or unpacked, and a bill of materials retired each record a summary line and nothing more.
• Approval decisions. An approval, a rejection and sending something for approval are all filed under the action Approve; the summary says which one it was.
• Bulk deletes and bulk reassignments on a CRM or custom-module list, one row per record touched. A bulk action in Documents is the other way round: moving or re-tagging a selection of files, and emptying the trash, each write a single row for the whole batch.
• Settings changes: taxes, numbering series, document and email templates, custom fields and field rules, reporting tags, module renaming and sidebar order, dependency rules, sharing rules, default module access, approval rules, plugins switched on and off, API keys created and revoked.
• People: a user added, changed or removed; a role created, changed or deleted; and a permission change on either, under the action Permission change.
• Successful sign-ins, and a switch from one workspace into another.
• A password changed by the person themselves from inside the app.
• A document, file or folder shared by link with a customer or vendor.
• Exports from the CRM lists — leads, customers, companies, deals, tasks, visits, contacts — and from custom modules.
• Sending the notification queue by hand, under the action Send, and emailing a lead, customer, company, deal, task or visit from the record itself, under Email — with the recipient’s address and the subject line in the summary.
• Emailing a quotation, invoice or other document from its send window, under Email on the document, naming who it went to and whether the PDF was attached.

What leaves no row at all

This is the half people get wrong. None of the following writes anything to the audit log.

• Reading. Opening a record, scrolling a list, running a report, viewing a dashboard. Nobody can be shown to have looked at something.
• Printing and PDFs. Printing an invoice, downloading its PDF, or downloading forty of them in one go.
• An invoice reaching Paid. Paid, Partly paid, Overdue, Reversed and Written off cannot be set by hand at all — the product refuses — and the balance that causes them is recalculated without writing a status row. The payment itself has its own row; the status move it triggers does not.
• Failed sign-ins. Only successful ones are recorded. A hundred wrong passwords against a director’s account leave the log empty.
• Signing out. There is no session-ended row, so you cannot tell how long somebody was in.
• A password set through a “forgot password” email. Changing your password from inside the app writes a row; resetting it from the emailed link does not.
• Most list exports. Invoices, quotations, sales orders, purchase documents, payments, items, vendors, projects and employees all export to CSV with no row written. Only the CRM lists and custom modules record an export.
• The audit log’s own export. Downloading the whole audit log writes nothing to the audit log.
• File downloads from Documents. These are recorded, but on the file’s own activity trail in the document store, not here.
• Most notifications and emails. A notification going out has its own record at Notifications › Send log rather than here. The two exceptions are in the list above.
• Document numbers being consumed. A number taken from a series and then abandoned leaves a gap and no explanation.

How far back it goes

To the first change ever made in your business. There is no retention setting, no scheduled clean-up, and no route anywhere in JAI CRM that updates or deletes an audit row. The log grows for the life of the business and is only ever added to. The rows go when the business itself is deleted, and then all of them go together.

Row-level security in the database confines the log to your business, so no other business on the platform can read it and yours cannot read theirs.

Exporting

The Export button hands you a CSV with six columns: When, Who, Action, Record, Summary and IP. Four things about it are worth knowing before you send it to an auditor.

• It ignores the filters on screen. Whatever you have typed into the search box or picked from the dropdowns, the file contains the whole log. The filters are sent to the server and the server does not read them.
• It stops at 10,000 rows. You get the most recent 10,000 and nothing says the file was cut short. On a busy business that is a few months, not a few years.
• It drops the field detail. The Before and After values are not in the file. Only the summary line survives.
• It names the individual record. The Record column in the file is the kind of record followed by that record’s identifier — so the file says which invoice, where the same column on screen deliberately does not.

Finding who changed one record

There are two routes, and the quicker one needs no audit permission at all.

1. Open the record itself and look for its History tab — sales and purchase documents, vendors, inventory items, stock transfers and adjustments, quality inspections, bills of materials, packages, manufacturing orders and project tasks all have one. CRM records and projects fold the same entries into their own tabs. This needs only View on that module, so a sales manager can answer the question without being handed Settings.
2. If the record has no History tab, go to Settings › Audit and put the document number, the customer’s name or the tax rate’s name into Search what happened or who. It matches the What happened column and the person’s name, anywhere in the text, ignoring capitals, and a record’s id exactly.

The History tab on a project task is worse than any of them: it shows the summary line alone, with the person’s name blank and the time an em dash on every row, and it never shows the field changes even though the server sends them. Until that is fixed, use Settings › Audit for project tasks.

Controls that do nothing

• The Record dropdown. It is meant to list the kinds of record in your log so you can pick one. The server never sends that list, so the dropdown only ever offers “Everything”. You cannot filter by record type from this screen.
• The Action dropdown. It falls back to five fixed choices — Create, Update, Delete, Login, Export — because the server never sends the real list either. Sixty-one action names are actually in use, including Status, Convert, Approve, Import, Restore, Purge, Assign, Reverse and Refund. None of them can be selected.
• The “Show 10 / 30 / 50 / 100” box beside the page count. Changing it does nothing; the page stays at 50 rows.
• The coloured Action badge. Every badge renders the same grey. The colour scheme it draws on is a list of record statuses, not actions, and the near misses are all the wrong part of speech — it knows approved but not approve, sent but not send. A Delete looks exactly like a Create. Read the word, not the shade.
• The Export button for a role without Export. It is shown to everybody who can open the screen. Somebody with View but not Export sees the button, presses it, and is refused.

What it will not do

• It does not fill in retrospectively. Field-level detail is captured at the moment of the change or not at all — turning something on later does not improve the rows already written.
• It does not restore anything. It tells you a record was deleted and by whom; putting it back is a separate job. Leads, customers, companies, contacts, deals, tasks, visits and records in your own modules are restored from Settings › Recycle bin within 60 days of the delete; for other record types no screen brings one back.
• It cannot be filtered by person or by date from this screen. There is no From/To box and no Who box. Scanning the pages is the only option.
• The before-and-after snapshots the product keeps are not shown anywhere in it. A third of the write sites — 119 of the 330 — store the whole record as it was and as it became, and none of that reaches a screen. A permission change on a user or role is the sharpest case: it stores the entire permission map both ways, and the panel for that row still says no field-level detail was recorded.
• A change whose audit row fails to write does not survive either. The audit row goes in on the same database transaction as the change itself, so a failed insert poisons that transaction: the error is logged on the server and the change is rolled back with it — sometimes after the screen has already said it saved.