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Activity and history

Changes to stock and products, purchasing, orders, customers and companies, Shopify, imports from your old system, and your team, sign-in and settings are recorded as they happen: what changed, on which record, who made it and when. A recorded change cannot be edited or deleted. When you need to know who changed one of these, this is where you look.

The activity does not yet show changes to accounting, shipping, notifications or billing.

Where to look

  • On the record itself. An order's Activity and a person under Customers's Timeline list what has happened to it, in sentences, under the day it happened.
  • On a SKU's page. The Activity section opens every change made to that SKU's stock and settings. See Inventory.
  • Across the business. Activity log in the sidebar lists what is recorded, newest first, and narrows it by area, action, date, record or person.

Finding who changed a record

Where to start depends on what changed:

  • An order, or a person under Customers: its Activity or Timeline, below.
  • A SKU's stock or settings: the SKU's page › Activity.
  • A purchase order, a company, a location, a team member or a setting: the Activity log, on the matching tab: Purchasing for a purchase order, CRM for a company, Inventory for a location, Auth for your team, sign-in and settings.

On an order or a person:

  1. Open the order, or the person under Customers.
  2. Scroll to its Activity (on an order) or Timeline (on a person). Each line starts with who acted: "Jane Smith changed the phone and note".
  3. When the record has activity from more than one area, a menu above the list (it reads All activity) keeps one, such as Fulfilment.
  4. Press the arrow beside a line to open it. It lists the fields the change carried, with ids shown as the names people use: SO-00042, the location's name, the customer.
  5. To see more, press Show older activity, or View the full trail to open the Activity log already searched for this record.

A person's Timeline also lists the activity of their orders. A person's profile (their name, email, phone, addresses and notes) is kept sealed, so the activity says which of those fields changed but never quotes the old or new values. The values are on the record. If a person's data is erased, the words of their notes and sealed fields go with it; the change itself stays recorded, and a note reads "The words were erased with this person's data."

Example: who changed a team member's roles. Open Activity log, choose the Auth tab, and look down the Action column for the role change on that person. The Actor column says who made it. See Team for what roles are.

The Activity log

Activity log in the sidebar lists the recorded changes across your organization. Each row shows:

When
How long ago: 5m ago, 3d ago, or a date once it is two weeks old. Hover it for the exact time.
Action
What happened, such as Stock adjusted or Order created, with the area it belongs to beside it. A change to settings or details also says what changed, for example name → Blue widget, sellable → false.
Entity
The record it happened to: a SKU, an order, a purchase order, a customer, a location. Click it to open it, or its list for a location, transfer, team member or channel.
Actor
Who did it. See Who acted. Click a person's name to see only what they did.
Service
The part of Manifold that recorded it, and a number for the change.

Press + on a row to see everything that was recorded: the exact time and the full contents of the change. The # number and the ids shown there identify this exact change, if you need to quote it to support or a developer.

Narrowing the log

  • The tabs keep one part of Manifold: Inventory, Purchasing, Fulfilment, CRM, Shopify or Auth (sign-in, your team and settings). All services shows everything. The Import & export tab is empty for now; imports from your old system show under All services.
  • Actions keeps one kind of action, such as only Inventory or only Auth actions.
  • From and To keep a range of whole days. Days run midnight to midnight UTC, so a change late in your evening or early in your morning may fall on the day before or after. Widen the range by a day if something is missing.
  • To see what one person did, click their name in the Actor column.
  • To see one record's changes, use View the full trail from the record.
  • Or type an id into Search by entity or actor id. A SKU's id is the SKU as it is spelled, in capitals: WIDGET-1. An order or purchase order is found by its id, not its number; press Show system ids to see ids on screen.
  • Press Clear to drop the filters.

Most changes appear as they happen; Shopify's appear the next time the list refreshes. Press Pause to hold the list still while you read it, and Play to follow again. Each fetch brings the most recent entries; press Load older activity at the foot to keep going back, as far as your organization's first day.

If a part of Manifold cannot be reached, a banner says so: "Not shown: activity from Purchasing could not be read for you right now." The rest of the log is still correct; try again shortly.

Who acted

Every change names who made it. There is no change without one. The Activity log names them like this:

A person
Shown by name. Someone who is not a member of your organization, such as a partner's staff, shows as a short id beginning usr_; Settings › Users lists members.
A person, with "(as …)" after it
Someone signed in as that person to help them. Jane Smith (as Sam Lee) means Sam Lee, signed in as Jane to help her, made the change.
An AI agent
An agent acts as the person who connected it, so its changes show under that person's name, the same as their own. See AI agents.
App · name
An installed app acting on its own, such as App · Shopify bridging an order in or pushing stock out. An app is never shown as the person who installed it.
System · job
Manifold's own background work: a scheduled job, a webhook received, a sync with your old system. The text after System · is a technical name for the job; for example auth-service:go-live is the go-live step. While Manifold follows your old system before you go live, the changes each sync brings in show this way.

An order's Activity and a person's Timeline name people and apps the same way, but show a background job by its job name alone, without System ·, and do not show who was signed in as someone else.

A SKU's activity

On a SKU's page, the Activity section shows the latest change and how long ago. Open it for the full list, newest first: When, What, Details, By and the change's number. It updates live. A kit's list includes changes to its components, with a SKU column saying which. Press Show older changes to go back to the day the SKU was created.

Anyone who works with stock or products, including receiving, purchasing and allocation staff, can read a SKU's activity. The Activity log and the activity on orders and customers are for owners and admins (see Who can see it).

Seeing everything as it stood

To see what the business looked like just after a change, open the line in a record's activity and press View everything as it stood after this. Stock, products, purchase orders, orders and customers then show as they stood at that moment. Other screens, such as financials, reports, settings and the Activity log itself, still show today.

A bar at the foot of the window says Viewing as of and the moment. From it you can:

  • Drag the slider to move an hour at a time through the last thirty days.
  • Type any earlier date and time.
  • Press Back to now to return.

Changes are off while you view the past, on every screen. Nothing you press is saved or sent until you return to now. The moment holds for that browser tab, including if you reload it; a new tab starts at now.

Notes

On an order and on a person under Customers you can also Leave a note... and press Post. Notes appear in the same list as the activity, under your name. As the screen says, only you and other staff can see notes.

Who can see it

Activity log appears in the sidebar only for owners and admins. On an order or a person, other members see "Reading the activity trail needs the activity:read scope" where the activity would be. This means your roles do not include the activity trail: only an owner or admin can see it, and no role you can be given grants it. See Team.

A SKU's activity is open to anyone who works with stock or products (see A SKU's activity).

For developers