Audit Trail

What is an audit trail?

The record of trading information identifying, for example, the brokers participating in each transaction, the firms clearing the trade, the terms and time or sequence of the trade, the order receipt and execution time and, ultimately, and when applicable, the customers involved. (Source: CFTC)

An audit trail or audit log is a chronological sequence of audit records, each of which contains evidence directly pertaining to and resulting from the execution of a business process or system function.

Audit records typically result from activities such as transactions or communications by individual people, systems, accounts or other entities.

In telecommunication, the term means a record of both completed and attempted accesses and service, or data forming a logical path linking a sequence of events, used to trace the transactions that have affected the contents of a record.

In information or communications security, information audit means a chronological record of system activities to enable the reconstruction and examination of the sequence of events and/or changes in an event.

In accounting, it refers to documentation of detailed transactions supporting summary ledger entries. This documentation may be on paper or electronic records. (Source: Wikipedia)