The Adobe Acrobat Sign History and Audit Report features are available to all users of the system. Every agreement associated with a user has a history and a related audit report.
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 viewers time zone based on local system settings)
- Each event that changes the document (i.e. modification, recipient action) contains a link that shows the document immediately after that event
- 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)
- When the transaction is still “in-flight,” the bottom of the Activity list shows a list of anticipated recipients remaining in the agreement workflow
- 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). If the agreement is deleted from the user account for any reason, the History content is lost with that item view and cannot be recovered
Audit Reports contain the same agreement milestones as the History panel 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. 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 at the time 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.
- Audit Reports are stored independently of the agreement objects viewed in the Manage tab of the web application. Deleting an object from the manage page does not delete the audit report.
- If you know the transaction ID of an agreement, then you can access the Audit Report for that transaction from the website: https://secure.echosign.com/verify (security settings permitting)
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 at the time 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.
How it's used
The Activity list is displayed on the Manage page by clicking the Activity link at the bottom of the right tail options:
The Audit Report is accessed through the Manage tab.
Select the agreement and click Download Audit Report
How to enable or disable
The History panel and Audit Reports are enabled by default for all users and cannot be disabled.
Configuration Options
Audit reports have three UI controls that govern access to the report, and one API setting:
- Attach the Audit Report to the Signed and Filed email.
- Attach the Audit Report to documents downloaded from the Manage page.
- Allow access to the Audit Report via the transaction verification page.
- Attach Audit Report via API when getLatestDocument is called.
Attach the Audit Report to the Signed and Filed email
The control is found on the Global Settings page (Group Settings for group-level adjustments)
This option is set to All by default and can be configured at the Account or Group level.
The question to ask is “Who should get the Audit Report with the Signed and filed email?”
The options are:
- Never – No one gets the Audit Report.
- For Sender Only – Only the sender of the agreement will get the Audit Report attached.
- All (Default) – All participants will get the Audit Report.
When included, the Audit Report is concatenated with the agreement in one attached PDF.
Attach the Audit Report to documents downloaded from the Manage page
This option is disabled by default and can be enabled/disabled at the Account or Group level.
The control is found on the Global Settings page (Group Settings for group level adjustments).
When enabled, all documents downloaded by the user from their manage page will include the Audit Report as part of the agreement PDF.
Allow access to the Audit Report via the transaction verification page
This option is disabled by default and can be enabled/disabled at the Account or Group level.
The control is found on the Global Settings page (Group Settings for group-level adjustments).
When enabled, the Audit Report can be accessed on the verifier page by anyone that has the agreement transaction ID.
Attach Audit Report via API when getLatestDocument is called
It is possible to have the Audit Report automatically attached to any document retrieved using the getLatestDocument call.
This option is False by default.
The setting must be enabled by your success manager and applies to all instances of the call.
Documents that are still in process will get an Interim report.
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