What a payroll audit trail should show

An audit log that only records “payroll run approved” is not much of an audit log. Useful history is field-level and immutable.

Field-level changes

When a pay element, employee record, or statutory identifier changes, the log should show the property, the old value and the new value, the person and the timestamp.

Lifecycle events

Run created, calculated, approved, paid, voided, corrected. Each with an actor and a time.

Append-only

Audit records cannot be edited or deleted, including by an administrator. That is what makes them trustworthy.

In TropicalHR the audit log is written in the same transaction as the change it describes, so it can never drift from what actually happened.