This post is coming from an auditor's view point when using the audit trail.

I came across this flaw after spending several hours searching for an invoice adjusted by the client that was tossing out retained earnings.

The audit trail has no way to filter for what was previous in another year and been edited into a current year.

The issue has arose when a client adjusted (edited and not deleted) an invoice that was in the 2017 Dec year end to March 2018. This tossed out retained earnings. So, after spending several hours tracking down this edit and chasing a couple of red herrings, I realized in Sage50, I would have just tossed on "Show Corrections" and the "Audit Trail" they have there is a journal entry made for every change, so I could have seen at the bottom of their General Ledger a reversing entry for this invoice and to whom. This type of function does not seem to exist in QBO.

In QBO if they adjust the invoice date to the new year there is no "This was the previous invoice date in the search". So in essence if they adjust the invoice we need to know which invoice it is or go through every single invoice in the new year.

This seems like a major flaw in an "audit trail".

Now I understand we can "lock" previous years, but this is not always a practical solution for some clients. Or these changes could have been made between the "initial data pull" and the entry of year end adjustments and subsequent lock.

I am new to QBO and am still learning the ropes, but this seemed like a serious issue, as this was one invoice, I have had multiple clients back date dozens of sales and invoices before and if they were on QBO I would have been spending hours on fixing this.

Additionally, printing the Audit Trail "Comparison" is flawed as well, it only prints essentially whats on the screen (has the scrolling bar on the right of the PDF), this comparison would be very helpful to have for supporting documents, but in its current printable form is useless.

And when printing the audit trail as a whole, does not take into account the sorting being applied to the audit trail and sorts it back to the original report.

Lastly, I am vaguely aware of the prior year locking function, but this should not be the "well just use that to prevent these issues" crutch for a flawed system.

Hope this helps you improve your system as I expect cloud bookkeeping to be the norm going forward in the industry and the old dogs will need to adapt.