The Business Impact of Audit Trail (Edit Log) Rule

The Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) notified a rule mandating every business that uses accounting software to maintain their books of account to have an audit trail feature. The new rule mandates every company maintains a record and edit log of each transaction.

According to the recent notification, the new audit trail rule in accounting software will now be implemented from 1st April,2023. This was originally planned for 2021 and but later the effective date was moved to 1st April,2022. Now, it is postponed to 1st April, 2023

With this new audit trail rule, all accounting software must record edit logs pertaining to every transaction, and it must be configured such that the audit trails cannot be disabled.

With audit rule notified, you might be having several concerns about the impact and implications of the audit trail rule on businesses. Is it applicable to all businesses? Is your existing accounting software compliant with the new rule? What are the penalties if it doesn’t adhere to the new audit trail (edit log) rule? Do you need to change how you have been operating all these years?

To answer that, the new amendment, which aims to bring transparency and accountability while restricting any data manipulation, will also enable better productivity for businesses.

Impact of audit trail (edit log) on businesses

Companies that fall under the purview of the MCA will be impacted by the new audit trail rule. Having said that, here’s a quick rundown of the impact the new audit trail rule will have on businesses:

• Ensure existing software provides audit trail facility

The existing accounting software that companies are using to maintain their books of account should have the audit trail facility that would be able to log any changes that are done pertaining to any transactions.

• Switch to different software

Suppose the existing accounting software doesn’t have the audit trail facility or cannot enhance its capabilities within the software. In that case, companies will have to look for an alternative option to remain compliant with the new rule.

• Enable staff

To ensure that businesses adhere to the new audit trial rule, their staff need to be enabled to tackle the change in the accounting software. They may have to bring in some degree of change in the way they are using the accounting software.

• Penalties unknown at the moment

At this moment, the repercussions and penalties that companies may have to bear in case of non-compliance with the audit trail notification are not clear.

Audit trail features accounting software should have

As per the new amendment, accounting software will be required to have the following features:

• Track all changes made in transactions
• Capture date when such changes were made
• Ensure that the audit trail cannot be disabled
• Edit log facility should be operated throughout the year
• Edit log should not be tampered
• Edit log to be preserved as per the requirement of record retention
• CA needs to certify if the software used is compliant or not

Audit trail (edit log) features of TallyPrime Edit Log Release 2.1

The latest release 'TallyPrime Edit Log Release 2.1', is enhanced with the edit log feature that caters to the amendment released by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA). Following are the features of TallyPrime edit log release:

• Track the edits for masters and every transaction
• Capture the date details and username when such changes (edits) are made
• Difference report to show the elements of the version that have been modified
• Reports are enhanced to filter the edited transactions
• Designed to ensure edit log feature will be enabled all the time to meet the MCA guidelines of ‘Edit trail cannot be disabled.’