Audit log

A customer asks why their order was held. You open the audit log, filter by their customer ID, and see the trail: 15 April, Jo applied the Caution flag with the note “Address flagged by AVS on prior order.” 18 April, the new order was held for review. 19 April, Priya released the hold after phone verification. You tell the customer the story with dates and names. The question answers itself.

That’s what the audit log does once it’s on: keeps a filterable, exportable record of the decisions your team makes, so “what happened with this customer?” has a real answer instead of a best guess.

Off by default. On when you need it.

Audit logging is opt-in. Nothing’s captured until you turn it on at Tracksies > Audit Log. That default is deliberate: a continuously logging shop can add thousands of rows a day, and most shops don’t need every action recorded all the time. Turn it on for the week you’re troubleshooting a complaint, the quarter you’re doing a compliance review, or ongoing if your context genuinely needs it.

While logging is active, a weekly reminder email arrives. Flipped it on for a specific reason in February? You’ll get a nudge each week to decide whether it still needs to be on, or whether it can come off again.

What gets captured

Each bucket has its own toggle in the audit-log settings, so you can record exactly the noise you want without the rest:

• Customer changes (create, update, status transitions, merge, alias add/remove, interaction add/edit/delete).
• Order events (status changes, package created, package shipped, tracking added).
• Returns workflow (request, status transitions).
• Settings (WordPress and Tracksies option changes, via the update_option hook).
• Data exports (GDPR audit-log exports from the Customers page log count and purpose; metadata only, never the exported data itself).
• Optional: login attempts (successful and failed). Off by default, so shops that don’t want login noise can leave it there.

Each row stores: the action, the object type and ID, the user ID of whoever acted, client IP, user agent, a timestamp, and (where relevant) before/after values as JSON.

Find what you’re looking for

The viewer at Tracksies > Audit Log has filters built around the questions you’re typically trying to answer:

• Date range: today, last week, a specific incident window.
• Object type: customer, order, return, setting, or user.
• Action: text match on the action name (status_changed, package_shipped).
• Free-text search: matches across action names and the before/after JSON, so “that Caution flag Jo applied last month” surfaces by searching for the note text.

50 entries per page, newest first. Combine the filters to narrow a window (“all return changes last week”, “all customer changes on 15 April”).

Export

The audit log page has an Export as CSV button: dumps the 10,000 most recent rows, regardless of filters. Useful for a quarterly backup or a handover to whoever’s running compliance for you.

For GDPR subject-access requests, the Customers page has a separate per-customer audit-log export: select the customers involved (up to 100 at a time); the export pulls up to 5,000 of their audit entries across those customers. That export is itself logged with the customer count and purpose, so the audit trail of access to audit entries stays intact.

Privacy-aware by design

When a customer is erased under GDPR Article 17, their audit entries get scrubbed automatically. The action shape (what happened, when, by whom) stays for your records, but the identifying details in the before/after JSON are nulled. The log keeps its aggregate-stats usefulness without carrying the erased customer’s data forward.

Retention, not forever

The audit table grows while logging is active, so an auto-purge cron deletes entries older than your configured retention (default 30 days). Adjust in settings if you need longer for compliance, or shorter for a tighter privacy posture.

Historical entries stay in the table if you turn logging off; they’re just not added to. You can still query and export what’s already there.

A note on what this is and isn’t

The audit log is a robust trail of what’s happened inside Tracksies: who did what, when, with what before-and-after detail, retained for as long as you’ve configured. The toolset (action logging, free-text search, filterable export, GDPR-aware scrubbing, configurable retention) is built to support most of the audit needs shops typically have, including for compliance and dispute resolution.

What we can’t tell you is whether the log, as you’ve configured it, satisfies any specific regulator or jurisdiction’s requirements. That’s a question for a lawyer who works in your sector and your country. We’ve built the levers (what to log, how long to keep it, how to export it); pulling them in a way that meets your obligations is a conversation worth having with someone qualified to advise on it.

If you’re weighing this up against WP Activity Log

WP Activity Log is the established general-purpose WordPress audit plugin: WordPress and WooCommerce events, users, media, plugins, themes, a wide surface area. If you want one audit plugin for the whole WP site, it’s the obvious choice.

Tracksies’ audit log is narrower in scope and deeper in context. It knows about Tracksies-specific actions (flag changes, customer-status transitions, returns transitions, alias add/remove, tag recalculations) and records them with the rich metadata those actions produce. WP Activity Log covers the breadth of WordPress and sees Tracksies events only at a generic level.

Run both. Each handles its own domain. If you’re already on WP Activity Log for the WordPress-wide audit, Tracksies’ log adds the Tracksies-specific context without stepping on it.

Already on Stream or a SIEM pipeline?

Stream and SIEM platforms (Splunk, Datadog, Sumo Logic) suit shops that need centralised log aggregation across multiple systems, long retention, or security-team tooling. Tracksies’ audit log lives inside your WordPress database; it’s built for the staff member trying to answer “why did this happen?” on a specific customer or return. If you also need log shipping, a plugin that forwards WP events to your SIEM can include the Tracksies audit table in what it ships.

Why shops turn it on

The audit log is the part of the system you don’t notice until you need it. The customer who says “you never told me.” The staff handover where context would otherwise be lost. The regulator request. The quiet question about who changed what last week.

When it’s on, the log answers all of those. When it’s off, your database stays lean. The choice lives with you, one button away.