Audit Timelines

Summary

Audit timelines turn workflow state changes into an operator-readable history. They answer what happened, who or what caused it, and what evidence was used.

Problem

State machines are hard to debug when only the current state is visible. A repair action may look wrong unless the operator can see the failed attempt, correction, retry, and downstream effect.

Principle

Every meaningful transition should leave a compact event that can be displayed and joined back to artifacts, attempts, issues, and actor context.

Platform Shape

Shared workflow events provide the generic primitive. Precon keeps a domain-native audit event model for opportunities, and payroll exposes review history in the time-review UI. The implementation details differ, but the architectural obligation is the same: operators need state history, not only state snapshots.

Source Evidence

• services/workflow/events
• docs/domains/preconstruction.md
• services/precon/observability
• app/web/app/payroll/time-review

Related Reading

• docs/engineering/concepts/run-artifacts-and-observability.md
• docs/engineering/concepts/approval-and-actor-context.md