Round 48 of our Dynamics GP vs. Dynamics Business Central: Functionality Face-Off series.
Sooner or later, someone asks the question. An auditor. A controller. A frustrated AP clerk. “Who changed this? And what did it say before?”
How well your ERP answers that question matters. In Round 47 we compared how GP and Business Central control who can touch your data. This round is the follow-up: once someone does touch it, what kind of trail do they leave behind?
Dynamics GP has a real audit trail — it has had one for decades. But it is built to trace transactions, not people. Business Central keeps that transaction trail and adds a change log that records who changed what, when, and what the old value was. Let’s walk through both.
How you do it in Dynamics GP
GP’s audit trail is built around two kinds of codes that follow every posted transaction.
- Understand the two codes. The source document code identifies the entry or document a transaction is based on — an invoice, a check, a receipt. The audit trail code identifies the exact posting journal the transaction appears on.
- Read an audit trail code. Each code is a prefix plus a journal number. GLTRX00000485 means General Transaction Posting Journal number 485. RMSLS00000214 means Sales Entry Posting Journal number 214. The number goes up by one every time you post from that origin.
- Set them up. Open the Audit Trail Codes Setup window (Administration >> Setup >> Posting >> Audit Trail Codes). Pick a series, set the next journal number, and assign a default source document code to each audit trail code. The codes GP ships with cannot be changed or added to.
- Trace a transaction. Start from a G/L entry, note its audit trail code, pull the matching posting journal, and follow it back to the source document. It works — as long as you kept the posting journals. For many GP shops, that means binders of printed journals or folders of saved reports.
- Need to know who changed a field? Core GP does not record that. There is a separate Audit Trails module you can install and configure to track change history on specific tables, but it is an extra setup project — not something GP does out of the box and can slow your GP to a crawl.
GP’s model is honest bookkeeping: every posted amount can be traced to its journal and its source document. What it does not give you is a record of the edits along the way — who changed a vendor’s remit-to address, or what a credit limit was last Tuesday.
How you do it in Business Central
Business Central covers the same ground three ways: posted documents that cannot be edited, a Find Entries tool for tracing, and a change log for the “who changed what” question.
- Posted documents are permanent. When you post an invoice or shipment in BC, the posted document is locked. Nobody quietly rewrites history — corrections happen as new documents, like the credit memos we covered in Round 19.
- Trace with Find Entries. From almost any page, press Ctrl+Alt+Q or choose the Find entries action on a posted document. BC lists every related document and ledger entry that shares the document number and posting date — G/L entries, customer entries, VAT entries, item entries. You can also search by external document number, or by serial and lot number. No binders required.
- Turn on the change log. Open the Change Log Setup page, choose Tables, and pick exactly which tables and fields to track — vendor bank accounts, customer credit limits, posting groups. You choose whether to log inserts, updates, and deletes.
- Read the entries. The Change Log Entries page shows each change in order: the user ID, the date and time, the table and field, the type of change, the old value, and the new value. That is the exact sentence auditors want to hear.
- Security changes are always logged. BC always records changes to users, permission sets, and access control — and to the change log setup itself. You cannot turn that off. If someone edits the log’s own settings, that edit is logged too.
One practical note: be choosy about what you track. Microsoft recommends logging your most important master-data fields, not ledger entries or posted documents — those are already permanent. A focused change log stays fast and readable.
Side by side
| Dynamics GP | Business Central | |
|---|---|---|
| Transaction tracing | Audit trail codes + printed posting journals | Find Entries (Ctrl+Alt+Q) shows all related entries on screen |
| Who changed a field | Not in core GP; separate Audit Trails module to install | Built-in change log with user, date, old and new value |
| Setup | Audit Trail Codes Setup window per series | Change Log Setup page; pick tables and fields |
| Security changes | Not automatically tracked | Always logged; cannot be turned off |
| Posted documents | Posting journals as reports | Locked posted documents with full drill-down |
| Where the trail lives | Reports you print or save | Pages you filter, search, and export |
Why Business Central comes out ahead
Credit where it is due: GP’s audit trail codes are a genuinely solid design. Every posted transaction carries a code that points to its exact posting journal, and disciplined GP sites can trace any number back to a source document. That discipline is the catch — the trail depends on journals being kept and on nobody needing to know about edits that happened before posting.
Business Central answers the harder question. The change log records the person, the timestamp, the old value, and the new value for any field you choose to track — and it guards the security tables and its own settings automatically. Tracing is a keyboard shortcut instead of a trip to the report archive. And because posted documents are locked, the history you drill into is the history that happened.
If your auditors are asking for more than your GP posting journals can show, that conversation is easier in Business Central — and it pairs naturally with the permission sets and security filters we covered in Round 47.
Ready to see it live?
Aisling Dynamics has helped companies run — and leave — Dynamics GP for years, and we know what a clean audit story looks like in both systems. See what we offer, or contact us at (251) 293-0555 for a walkthrough of the change log against your own audit requirements.
Next round: sites and bins — GP’s sites and multi-bin setup vs. Business Central’s locations and bins. The warehouse rounds begin.