Activity history

Who can use it. Every staff member sees their own activity. The whole organisation's history is for owners; an owner can give an individual staff member permission to see it too. Clients never see any of it. It may not be switched on for your business yet. If you can't see it, give us a yell.

What it's for

"Who moved this job to Approved?" "When did that to-do get reassigned?" Activity history answers those without anyone having to remember. It records the meaningful changes: things being created, edited, assigned, moved, completed and deleted. It deliberately does *not* record people simply looking at things: no views, no searches, no clicks.

Where to find it

• The whole organisation: Settings → Activity history.
• One job: open the deal, and the Activity section on the Overview tab now shows that job's history alongside the usual client-portal and CRM items.

Both lists are newest-first, with a Load more button at the bottom.

Finding one particular change

The organisation view is built to answer a question like *"who moved this job to Approved, and when?"* without scrolling. Narrow it with any combination of:

• Type: deals, notes, to-dos, team permissions or automations.
• Person: one staff member's actions. (If you only see your own activity, this list only offers you.)
• From / To: a date range. Dates are your business's own dates, matching the times printed beside each entry, so "the 3rd" means the 3rd where you are.
• Find: type part of a deal or to-do name and press Search. It matches the words in the entries themselves, so "kitchen" finds every change to the Kitchen reno job.

Clear filters puts the whole history back. Whatever you've narrowed to is kept in the page address, so you can bookmark it, reload it, or paste it to someone else and they'll see the same view (subject to what they're allowed to see; filters never widen that).

Opening the thing that changed

Each entry about a deal your business still has ends in a link to that deal, labelled open deal, or the deal's name where the entry doesn't already mention it. Click it to go straight there, and use your browser's Back button to come back to exactly the same filters, the same loaded entries and the same place in the list.

Entries whose deal has since been deleted say "deal no longer available" rather than linking anywhere. That's deliberate: the history deliberately outlives the things it describes, so an entry about a deletion will always name something that no longer exists.

Beside a linked deal there's also only this deal, which narrows the whole list to that job's history.

What gets recorded

| You do this | The history says | |---|---| | Create a deal | *Alex created Kitchen reno* | | Move a deal to another stage | *Alex moved Kitchen reno from Quoting to Approved* | | Move a deal to another pipeline | *Alex moved Kitchen reno to Approved in the Renovations pipeline* | | Add a note to a deal | *Alex added a note on Kitchen reno* | | Create a to-do | *Alex created the to-do "Order timber"* | | Assign (or unassign) a to-do | *Alex assigned "Order timber" to Sam* | | Complete a to-do | *Alex completed the to-do "Order timber"* | | Delete a to-do | *Alex deleted the to-do "Order timber"* | | Create an automation | *Alex created the automation "Enquiry follow-up"* | | Rename an automation or change its trigger | *Alex edited the automation "Enquiry follow-up": changed its trigger settings* | | Add, remove or change an automation's steps | *Alex changed the steps of the automation "Enquiry follow-up": added Create deal; edited Send email* | | Switch an automation on or off | *Alex switched off the automation "Enquiry follow-up"* | | Delete an automation | *Alex deleted the automation "Enquiry follow-up"* |

Automation entries name the kinds of step that were added, removed or edited, not what the steps say: an email's wording stays in the automation editor. Putting the same steps in a different order, or pointing a branch at a different step, shows as *changed the order or routing of its steps*. Saving a new name or trigger without touching the steps shows as an edit to the automation, not a change to its steps. Moving the boxes around on the automation canvas isn't recorded.

If the person who did something has since left and their account was removed, the entry stays and reads "Someone": the history isn't rewritten by an offboarding.

Who sees whose activity

• Owners see the whole organisation's history, automatically.
• Everyone else sees their own activity only, including on a job they can otherwise open in full. Being able to see a deal doesn't mean seeing what your colleagues did on it.
• An owner can grant a staff member the "View organisation activity" permission from that person's team page. Being an admin on its own doesn't grant it.
• Revoking that permission takes effect straight away: the next page they load is back to their own activity.
• Clients never see any activity history, on a job or anywhere else.

Notes now have their own section

Notes used to appear in the middle of the Activity feed, which made a busy job's feed hard to read and mixed "here's what I wrote" with "here's what changed".

Now a deal has a Notes section of its own, right under the *Add a note* box, showing the full text of every note with who wrote it and when. The Activity feed keeps a one-line "added a note" entry so the timeline is still complete, but the note's text lives in the Notes section, not in the history.

Nothing was lost in the move: every note you'd already written is in the new section.

How long it's kept

Three years, measured from when the thing actually happened. After that entries are deleted for good.

Looking further back than a year

Everything inside those three years reads the same way, from the same lists. You don't have to ask for "old" history, tick a box, or go somewhere else for it: just keep pressing Load more. The list carries on past the one-year mark without a break.

Behind the scenes, entries older than a year are squeezed down into a smaller, cheaper form so we're not keeping three years of history in the fast lane. That's a storage decision and nothing else: the same entries, the same wording, the same order, and the same rules about who can see whose activity. The only thing you might notice is that a page of very old entries takes a moment longer to appear.

That older, squeezed-down history is also checked over on its own, nightly, a batch at a time; the whole of it comes round every week or so. It's a read-only check: if a batch of old entries has been damaged since it was stored (a disk fault, a restore that went wrong), we find out from that check rather than from you happening to search for exactly those entries, and nothing is ever deleted because it couldn't be read. There's nothing to turn on and nothing you'll see: it runs overnight while nobody is looking at it.

Very occasionally a page of old history can't be read right then. When that happens the list says so, "some older history could not be loaded right now", rather than just stopping early and looking finished. Both lists do: the Activity Log in Settings and the Activity panel on a deal, where the notice replaces the usual "end of activity" line rather than sitting under it. The notice stays up while you keep pressing "Load more", because the part that couldn't be read is above where you are now and you won't pass it again; changing the Type filter or reloading the page starts the check over. Nothing has been deleted; try again shortly, and give us a yell if it keeps saying it.

If something you expect to see isn't there, it's one of three things: it happened more than three years ago (deleted, as above), it's someone else's activity and you don't have permission for the organisation-wide view, or it's a kind of change the history doesn't record. Give us a yell and we'll tell you which.