As Paycircle is a real-time collaborative platform, with potentially many people working with the same data at any one time, it’s important that all activity gets logged and that a detailed audit trail is kept. There’s also a ton of automation going on behind the scenes so it’s also important that users can see when an action or task has happened automatically.
We’ve built a stack of tracking, logging and auditing tools into the platform already but, as it’s an ever-evolving beast, we’re always adding to these types of features and tools – our most recent addition being the Paycircle ‘Black Box’.
The Black Box (named after the aircraft flight recorder, which is apparently orange and not black but there you go) is a tracking feature, which records every single interaction that any and every user has with the platform. To be more precise, it tracks and logs ‘service calls’ made to the database. This means that when a user performs an action in the application that views, adds, edits or deletes data a log gets stored. The user information gets stored along with date and time stamps for every action performed. This can be really useful when a more forensic analysis of activity is required.
As you can imagine, that’s a vast amount of tracking data! This is why we’ve made the Black Box feature more of a service that we provide (free of charge of course) rather than a feature, per se. For one-off requests, bureaus can contact the Paycircle support team to request specific logs relating to specific events or dates and times. For access to the entire Black Box area, we can provide bureaus with an API connection.
We’re always looking to enhance the tools we have so we already have plan in place to add a simple user interface to the Paycircle Black Box a bit further down the line. We will also add to the existing tools that users access every day in the app too. Keep your suggestions for features and enhancements coming!
And to recap, here’s a list of the logging, tracking and auditing features that already exist in the app. If you’re not sure how some of these features work, get in touch with our support team for more info.
🤟 Activity logging area that keeps a running log of everything that’s happening on each company’s payroll
💪 Admin ‘Notifications’ window to track mentions and warnings
🎯 Online and downloadable payroll audit reporting
😻 Payroll ‘Alerts’ for each pay period, including ‘Errors’, ‘Warnings’ and ‘Notices’
💅 Workflow ‘Activity’ audit area
🏋🏻♀️ Admin ‘Permissions’ audit reporting
🔍 Employee ‘History’ logging area, which is also searchable by subject matter
😎 Pension ‘History’ area, which logs all pension activity and is also searchable
☀️ Payroll ‘Changes’ area to track payroll changes each period
👍 Admin login activity tracking
👓 Employee login and registration activity tracking
⭐️ User IP address manager
Author: Catherine Pinkney