Review the events that have taken place through the agreement's signature cycle.
Overview
Every agreement in Acrobat Sign passes through a series of event “milestones” that define the progress of the transaction.
These milestones may include events such as:
- Document creation
- Modifications to the transaction sent
- Emails sent to recipients
- Email viewed by recipients
- Delegation of recipient authority
- Signatures/approvals applied to agreements
- Completed/declined/canceled status
Milestones are recorded in two formats with similar content, but slightly different goals:
The Activity list is an “at a glance” summary of where the transaction is in the end-to-end process, viewed within the Acrobat Sign application.
- The Activity list contains a minimal amount of information, only exposing the event, the user/recipient (identified by email address) that registered the event, and the time/date stamp of the event (adjusted to the viewer's time zone based on local system settings).
- The scope of the Activity list encompasses the whole transaction. As a result, you may see information that isn’t included in the audit report (which is more constrained towards document interaction). Such as retention and eVaulting events which take place after the document is completed.
- The Activity list is an element of the agreement, and is destroyed by explicit actions that remove agreements (eg: GDPR deletion). If the agreement is deleted from the user account for any reason, the Activity list is lost with that item and cannot be recovered.
Audit Reports contain the same agreement milestones as the Activity list, but include the Transaction ID of the authoritative document on the Acrobat Sign server.
Administrators can optionally enable the collection of IP addresses if needed.
Audit Reports are intended to be authoritative documents that articulate how a document has been manipulated from the moment it was created until it was fully resolved. They can be saved as PDF files and printed for internal processes as needed.
- A key difference to note is that the Audit Report shows all events standardized to the GMT time zone, unless explicitly configured to something else. This mitigates confusion for auditors reviewing transactions from users across multiple time zones.
- The Activity list is dynamically generated for the viewer and reflects all events in the time zone of the viewer's local system.
- The time stamp of the visible signature field embedded into the agreement reflects the time zone of the signer's local system when the signature is applied. The time zone code is supplied to provide context when viewing the PDF.
- The date stamp format is set to YYYY-MM-DD unless explicitly configured to something else.
- Audit Reports are stored independently of the agreement objects viewed in the Manage tab of the web application (or the Documents tab in Acrobat). Deleting an agreement does not necessarily delete the audit report.
The Audit Report has two stages:
- The "Interim" report – While a transaction is "in-flight," the Audit Report is generated from the events logged against the agreement when the request is made. By definition, this report is incomplete and subject to change when the next recipient commits a logged event.
Interim reports are clearly marked at the top of the report to ensure they cannot be misinterpreted as final documents if they are saved/printed.
- The “Final” report – Once the agreement reaches a terminal state (Signed, Canceled, Declined, or Expired), the final Audit Report is generated and stored. No further events that take place in relation to the transaction (e.g., retention) can be added to the report. This creates a full report of the events that took place to get the document signed, and nothing else.
Once logged in, select Manage > Status of the agreement you would like to see > Select the agreement name, then select Download Audit Report on the right pane.
The Audit Report is accessed through the Manage tab (in the enterprise view) or the Documents tab (in the Acrobat Pro and Standard view).
Select the agreement and select the Download Audit Report action.
Configuration
Availability:
The Activity list and Audit Reports are available for all Acrobat Sign accounts.
Configuration scope:
The Activity list is enabled by default and cannot be disabled. There are no explicit configurable options for the Activity list, but some optional features can insert their own events (authentication events, for example), and optional Audit Report events can also be reflected.
The Audit Report is enabled by default and reports on the major milestones of the agreement signature process; these elements cannot be disabled. Every agreement has an Audit Report.
Multiple options are available to enterprise organizations that insert events into the Audit Report, and some of these elements may be reflected in the Activity list. If there are events you think should be included in the Audit Report, check with your group or account administrator to see if they can be added.
Three methods provide access to the Audit Report for users:
- Attach the Audit Report to the Signed and Filed email.
- Attach the Audit Report to a downloaded document.
- Attach the Audit Report via API when getLatestDocument is called.
