Upgrade on Monk: Audit Log

Monk already had a collections activity log. We would show you what our AI agent is doing. We also had detailed activity at the invoice level. Former is useful to understand agent behavior and latter was useful for AR teams and month-end close.

A better logging system with a strong way to attribute actions and changes was needed.

So we built it!

What the Audit Log in Monk Unlocks

The audit log tracks the full history of your resources (contracts, invoices, amendments, comments).

Each entry shows who made the change, when they made it, and what it looked like before and after. One of the unique things about the audit log in Monk is it also separates system actions from user actions, so you always know whether a human or Monk's collections agent made the call.

How Customers Are Using It

1/ Someone on the team sees an invoice that looks off and they want to know why. The audit log gives them the answer in seconds. Here's the change, here's who made it, here's the diff

2/ Finance/accounting teams use it during month-end close. When you need to reconcile adjustments or explain variance, a clean history of every modification is simpler then reconstructing from memory

3/ Large teams on Monk who have a # of users on the platform are relying on the audit log for accountability and tracing changes. Who touched which invoice or contract amendment when? Audit log removes ambiguity.

The Technical Challenge in Building an Enterprise-Grade Audit Log

Largest challenge is building an system that is reliable when the surface area of a platform is large. Monk covers contracts, invoices, ajudstments, intelligent collections, renewals, metering for usage based billing and much more. And so, unifying this in one system and tracing all the changes is not trivial.

Second largest challenge is tying this to the intelligent collection agent. The agent makes automated decisions and those decisions need to show up in the same audit trail as manual user actions.

What's Next

Current plan is to expand the audit log in 2 directions: 

1/ greater granularity, beyond billing entities

2/ expanding UX and routing through rest of the product; imagine audit log tracing on the customer page

3/ API access to allow teams to pull audit data for internal reporting

Plan is to keep shipping!

If you want to check it out - please grab a time with our team here. And if you are interesting in building with LLMs in production for mission critical workflows like this one - reach out to george@monk.com

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