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Comments & history

Every document in Recognito carries an audit trail of field edits and approver actions. The History tab in Studio shows it in chronological order, with a "View changes" diff link on each entry.

History is read-only — you can't edit or delete entries. Recognito records the events as they happen.

Where History lives

Open any document in Studio and switch to the History tab. The view lists events in chronological order, oldest first.

Each event records:

  • Timestamp — when it happened.
  • Actor — the user or system component that caused it.
  • What changed — a short description of the event.

History persists for the life of the document. Even after a document is Approved and Exported, the History tab keeps the record.

Event types

Several event types show up in History. The most common ones:

Document updated

A field value changed — either via extraction (the engine writing initial values), a Mapping workflow (a rule populating a derived field), or a user editing the field manually. The entry records which field and what the change was.

You'll see many of these on any document. The first batch shows extraction populating the initial state; the next shows any Mapping rules that fired; further ones show edits the assignee made during review.

Approver Added

A user was added as an approver on the document — either because a workflow rule populated approvers_N_M, or because an admin manually assigned them.

Approver Removed

The inverse of Approver Added. The user is no longer in the approver list for the document.

Other events

The full list of event types isn't published. If you see an entry you don't recognize, the description usually makes its meaning clear.

What the History tab is for

Three common uses:

  • Recovering context — when you reopen a document after a few days, scrolling through History reminds you what's already been done.
  • Debugging stuck documents — if a document feels like it's in the wrong state, History shows what state changes have actually happened.
  • Audit and compliance — when finance or audit asks "who approved this and when," History is the record.

What History is not

History is a per-document trail. It doesn't give you an org-wide or project-wide audit log of every action across every document. If you need cross-document audit coverage, talk to your account manager.

Comments

When rejecting or approving a document, you can optionally leave a short comment. This is useful for recording "why" decisions — "Rejected: vendor not authorized for this PO" — that the action itself doesn't capture.

Use comments for non-obvious decisions

A rejection without a comment forces the next person to guess your reasoning. A one-sentence comment on a non-obvious decision saves your colleagues real time later.

What's next