Track contract changes with audit trails

Every contract in Contracko keeps an audit trail: a running record of how it was created, edited, and how its data and files changed over time. It captures actions taken by people in your organization and actions taken automatically by the system, by Clara, and through the API, so you can always trace how a contract reached its current state.

Where to find a contract's audit trail

Open any contract and select the Activity tab. You'll see a reverse-chronological feed of every change, each with the person or system responsible and a relative timestamp. Comments appear here too, and again in the separate Comments tab.

See activity across your organization

For a portfolio-wide view, open the Activity page from the main navigation. It pulls together activity from every contract you can access into one feed: exports, alerts, signature updates, and team changes across your organization. The per-contract Activity tab is the same record, scoped to a single contract.

What gets recorded

The audit trail logs the full lifecycle of a contract and the things attached to it:

• Contracts: creation, edits, status and owner changes, moves between folders, archiving, deletion, and restore. Edits show how many fields changed. Expand an entry to see the before and after values, for example a title, end date, or status.
• AI and ingestion: Contract created via integration API for contracts that arrive programmatically, AI extraction applied when Clara reads a document and fills in the fields, and Contract ready for review once extraction finishes.
• Signatures: the full signing lifecycle, including Signed contract ingestion queued, Signed contract ingested, and sent, signed, completed, declined, or expired.
• Files: uploads, new versions, downloads, and deletions.
• Comments: comments added, edited, or removed.
• Sharing: external share links created, viewed, and revoked.
• People and access: counterparties, member roles, and contract access changes.
• Exports: Export ready when a contract export finishes.

Each entry records who or what made the change (a teammate, the system, Clara, or an integration), the time, and, where relevant, the specific fields that changed.

Who can see the audit trail

A contract's Activity tab is visible to anyone with access to that contract, so the trail follows your existing contract permissions. The organization-wide Activity page shows events only from the contracts each member can already see.

Export the audit trail

When you export a contract, its activity comes with it. Each contract's folder in the export includes an activity.csv file alongside the contract data and files, with one row per event: time, activity, type, detail, actor, and the fields that changed. See Export contracts and data for the full export contents. Very long histories are capped at the 10,000 most recent events per contract.

Why it matters

A complete audit trail helps when you need to show what happened to a contract and when:

• Audits and compliance: show how a contract was created, changed, and approved.
• Internal reporting: trace decisions and edits back to the person or system that made them.
• No platform lock-in: the exported activity log is yours to keep, so you can move to another system or store records outside Contracko at any time.