Audit Trails in Colony Management: A GLP and IACUC Guide
Summary
An audit trail answers the question every inspector, auditor and regulator asks: "who changed what, and when?" In an animal research facility, that question comes up in IACUC inspections, AAALAC site visits, GLP study audits, and institutional reviews. This guide explains what a proper audit trail looks like in colony management software and how Colony.care's implementation supports GLP, IACUC and AAALAC requirements.
What an Audit Trail Must Do
A meaningful audit trail logs every create, update and delete operation on every record. For each change, it records: the timestamp, the user who made the change, the record that changed, the field that changed, the value before the change, and the value after the change. It must be queryable, "show me every change to animal A-427 in the past six months" should return results in seconds, not hours. It must be exportable, when an inspector asks for the audit log, you should be able to hand them a CSV or PDF. And it must be retained, indefinitely, not on a 90-day rolling window.
How Colony.care Handles Audit
Colony.care maintains an indefinite audit trail on every record type, animals, cages, breeding events, clinical observations, protocol assignments, billing records, user permissions changes. The audit log is queryable by record type, record ID, user, date range and action type. It exports as CSV or JSON. There is no retention limit, audit records do not expire by default.
For GLP-compatible facilities, the audit trail supports electronic signature workflows: changes are attributed to authenticated users with timestamp precision, and the before/after state of every field change is preserved. For IACUC and AAALAC inspections, protocol-to-animal linking and animal-use data exports are built in.
FAQ
How long is the audit trail retained?
Indefinitely by default. There is no automatic expiry. Audit records are retained for the life of your account.
Can we export the audit trail for an inspection?
Yes. The audit log can be filtered by record type, date range, user or action, and exported as CSV or JSON. You can generate an audit report for a specific animal, protocol, or time period in seconds.