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You refund what you cannot prove

Almost nobody asks for a record of who changed what. Nought point one two per cent of 274,676 posts. Then a customer disputes what they were told, nobody can say, and you concede.

September 2026 · 2 min read

Out of 274,676 posts from business owners, 332 mention wanting to know who changed something. Nought point one two per cent.

It stays at nought point one two per cent right up until the afternoon somebody deletes a record, or a figure moves, or a customer disputes what they were told. Then it is the only question in the room, and the honest answer is that nobody knows.

Why it is never in the brief

An audit trail does not demo. No customer has ever chosen a product because of one. It produces no visible feature, generates no screenshot, and the entire value of it is realised on days that mostly do not happen.

It also costs almost nothing while you are building. Recording who did what, at the moment the thing is done, is a small amount of work spread thinly across a codebase.

The asymmetry that makes this worth arguing aboutIt cannot be retrofitted onto the past. You can add audit logging in month nine, and it will tell you everything that happened from month nine onwards. The period you will actually want it for is gone and will not be reconstructed: the months where nobody was watching and the mistake was made. That is why we put it in whether or not it was asked for, and why it is one of the few things we will argue about in a scoping call.
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