A customer calls saying they were charged a different price than in the order. You look at the invoice — there is a discount nobody remembers. You ask the team — three people say "not me". The ERP shows the current state, but not who changed what, when. This is what most SME ERP rollouts are missing.
Change history (audit trail, change log) is a feature every serious ERP has — Comarch Optima, Comarch ERP XL, enova365, Subiekt (via extensions), Microsoft Dynamics — and one nobody turns on by default. The result: a customer complains, someone eats the loss out of margin, and three people take turns blaming each other.
What to log, what not to
The keyword is "material". You don't need to log everything. You need history where a change costs money or creates risk:
- Price lists and discounts — who changed an item price, a customer discount, a promotion.
- Customer master data — payment terms, credit limits, tax IDs.
- Sales documents — who edited an invoice after it was issued (where the system even allows it).
- Inventory levels — manual quantity corrections, transfers between warehouses.
- Payment definitions — customer bank accounts, payment methods.
- User permissions — who granted whom access to which module.
You don't need to log every window that got opened. A log of every click is a trap: data grows at a rate nobody reviews later, and system performance drops. Focus on what changes business state — not on who looked at what.
Turn it on once, verify it works
In Comarch Optima it is a checkbox in program configuration — "Change control" per module. In enova365 — "Data change register", enabled per object (customer, price list, document). In Dynamics — SQL Server Audit or Change Tracking, configured by an admin. Subiekt does not have it natively; you need an extension (e.g. Sfera plus custom database triggers).
Two things to check after enabling:
- Make a test change — change a product price, verify the log shows it with user and timestamp.
- Verify users cannot clear the log — if a sales rep can delete their own entry, the log means nothing.
That is a 30-minute job. The trick is not doing it — it is someone actually doing it before it is needed.
Who really uses the change history
Not the board. The board will look at it once a quarter, if margin looks strange. The people who really use the audit trail:
- The head accountant — when tracking why a document was reversed and by whom.
- The sales manager — when a customer disputes a price.
- The master data owner — when policing whether anyone changes price lists outside the agreed process.
- The external auditor — once a year, at annual close.
If none of these roles know the log exists — the feature is there but effectively is not. Book a 15-minute walkthrough for them: "where to click to see who changed the price on this invoice".
A concrete example
At one of our clients — a technical parts distributor (35 people, Comarch Optima) — the finance manager noticed that average margin had dropped 2.7 percentage points in a single month. Nothing in the pricing policy had changed. Analysts spent three days going through product categories, customers, seasonality — no conclusion.
Enabling change history on the price list (5 minutes in configuration) and comparing against the same month a year earlier surfaced the answer in 20 minutes: a new person in the sales team, while learning the system, had changed the "Strategic customers" group discount from 8% to 18%. The change hit 140 customers at once. Fix: restore the old discount and a 1:1 conversation with the new person about the fact that the "group discount" field is global. Without the log this would never have been explained, and the following month somebody would have done the same thing again.
Cost of enabling: half an hour of the ERP admin's time. Cost of not: about 12,000 zł in lost margin and three days of two people investigating.
What to do this week
Concrete list, 60 minutes in total:
- Ask the ERP admin whether change history is enabled, and for which objects.
- If not — enable it at minimum for: price lists, customer master data, inventory corrections.
- Make one test change and verify the log recorded it.
- Book a 15-minute walkthrough for the head accountant and the sales manager.
- In your "price complaint" procedure, add a step: "check the change history on the price list item".
You do not need a project, a budget or board approval for this. You need one afternoon.
When to call us
If your ERP does not have change history natively (e.g. older Subiekt), or you have it enabled but no sensible way to browse it (the SQL Server log exists, but nobody opens it) — this is a typical few-hours job: a small extension or a simple web panel that shows the accountant what she is looking for, without her having to log into the database. It is not a big project — it is a concrete thing that can be done in a week.
Without change history, every "who did this?!" ends with no answer. With it — it ends in 20 minutes.