Corporate Taxi Audit Log for Compliance-Ready Bookings

## What actions does the CabsOn audit log capture? We record every event that changes the state of a booking or a corporate account setting. That includes booking creation — who requested the ride, on behalf of which traveller, from which department budget, and the original quoted fare. It includes booking amendment — pickup change, destination change, passenger added, notes updated — with both the previous and the new values captured in the same row. Cancellations are logged with the cancelling user, the exact timestamp, the refund status, and whether the cancellation fell inside or outside our cancellation grace window. Driver assignment and reassignment — the dispatch decisions your traveller may never see — are captured for later dispute resolution. Payment events cover card charges, invoices raised, refunds issued, and any chargebacks opened, with the Revolut or Stripe reference number where applicable. On the account side, we log user administration — staff added or removed, role changed between traveller, approver, admin, or finance, and SSO group syncs from Google Workspace or Microsoft Entra. Approval workflow decisions record the approver's name, the decision taken, the rationale entered, and the budget cap that triggered the approval requirement in the first place. API key creation, rotation, and revocation are captured, as are admin login events including failed attempts and SSO handshakes. Each entry is written to an append-only table in our database. Administrators can view the log but cannot edit or delete entries — even a Corporate Owner cannot rewrite history from the portal. ## How is the audit trail protected against tampering? Every audit row is written inside the same database transaction that commits the underlying change. If the booking cancellation succeeds, the log entry succeeds; if either fails, both roll back. This gives you a guarantee that your log cannot be silently missing a real event that actually occurred. The table itself is append-only at the application layer — none of our controllers accept an UPDATE or DELETE against audit rows. At the database level, we keep rolling backups with point-in-time recovery, so even a hypothetical direct database write would be detectable against the backup lineage during a forensic review. We do not currently sign audit rows with cryptographic hashes, which is a common ask from banking-sector customers who need evidential-grade audit logs where each row's hash includes the previous row's hash. If that is a hard requirement for your compliance framework, please raise it with us before onboarding — hash-chained logs are on our roadmap and we can prioritise the work against a specific regulatory deadline. ## Can we download the audit log for our external auditors? Yes, and this is usually the reason organisations ask about the feature in the first place. From your business.cabson.uk admin portal, our reporting tools include an audit export. You choose a date range — up to twelve months per export, with longer ranges available on request — optionally filter by event type or user, and download the result as CSV or PDF. The CSV opens cleanly in Excel and includes column headers your auditors will recognise: timestamp_utc, actor_user_id, actor_email, event_type, resource_type, resource_id, previous_value, new_value. The PDF is formatted as a chronological report with page headers, totals, and a signed footer showing the export date and the user who requested it — the format most external accountants prefer for the physical audit file. For larger organisations with a dedicated internal audit team, we can also grant read-only API access to a secondary audit account, so your compliance software can pull the log continuously rather than waiting for a manual export at month end. ## How does the audit log support GDPR compliance? The Information Commissioner's Office requires that personal data processing be lawful, transparent, and auditable under UK GDPR. Our log meets the transparency requirement out of the box — you can show a data subject exactly which staff member accessed their booking history and when the access occurred. Retention is configurable. Our defaults hold financial records for seven years, matching HMRC's requirement for company accounting records, and non-financial administrative events for three years. When a former employee exercises their right to erasure, we anonymise their personal identifiers — email address, name, phone number — while retaining the anonymised transaction record your accounts team still needs for VAT reconciliation. The audit log records the anonymisation event itself, so you have proof of when the erasure request was actioned and by whom. If your organisation operates under stricter retention requirements — for instance, financial services firms under FCA SYSC 9 must retain records for at least five years post-relationship — we can extend retention on your account to whichever duration your DPO specifies. ## Is CabsOn's audit trail suitable for SOX-regulated industries? Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404 requires management to attest to the effectiveness of internal controls over financial reporting. For UK subsidiaries of US-listed parent companies — and for UK firms voluntarily adopting SOX-style controls — the taxi expense workflow is often flagged as a low-value but high-frequency transaction stream that needs its own audit chain. We support this with segregation of duties: approvers cannot approve their own bookings; finance users can view invoices but cannot create bookings; admin users can manage the account structure but cannot approve expenses unless explicitly granted the finance role. Approval-chain enforcement means bookings above configurable thresholds require documented sign-off before the driver is dispatched, and that sign-off is recorded in the log. The transaction record is immutable as described above, and every booking is tied to a named human user with their SSO identity rather than a shared login. We are not a SOC 2 Type II certified provider today. If SOC 2 attestation is a hard requirement for your parent company's controls testing, be aware that this is on our compliance roadmap but not yet complete — Uber for Business and Addison Lee are both further ahead on that specific certification. ## Who in our organisation can view the audit log? By default, only users with the Corporate Owner or Finance Admin role can access the full audit export. Department managers see audit entries scoped to their department — they can review who in their team cancelled which booking, but they cannot see other departments' activity. Individual travellers see their own booking history, including cancellations and amendments, presented as a personal timeline rather than a compliance report. You can also create a dedicated Audit role that has read-only access to the full log and nothing else — useful when you want to give your internal audit team a login without exposing booking or invoice creation permissions. ## How does CabsOn compare to Uber for Business and Addison Lee on audit transparency? Uber for Business provides a robust admin dashboard with per-ride receipts, expense category tagging, and export into expense management tools such as Expensify and SAP Concur. Their strength is scale, and their integrations catalogue is deeper than ours today. What their standard product does not currently offer is a per-action administrative audit log — the log they surface is transaction-focused rather than change-focused. Addison Lee, at the enterprise tier, provides account statements and management reports with named-traveller detail. Their strength is their London chauffeur fleet and the polish of their corporate account managers. Their audit reporting is comparable to ours for financial records; their per-admin-action logging is less granular than what we describe on this page. Where we believe we lead is on the combination of admin-action logging, downloadable format, and configurable retention — you can pull a single report that shows every non-financial administrative change alongside the booking history in one export. Where they lead: overall fleet size (Uber), premium chauffeur vehicles (Addison Lee), and native integrations into SAP Concur and Certify. If embedded connectors to those expense platforms are a hard requirement today, one of those providers may fit better; we integrate via CSV and API rather than native connector at this stage. ## What does a typical audit query look like in practice? A finance controller at a Manchester recruitment agency contacted us in April asking why a 340-pound booking to Manchester Airport had appeared on their February invoice with no associated candidate name. Within four minutes of logging into their admin portal, they had the answer: the booking had been created by a departmental admin, later reassigned by the same admin to a different candidate, then cancelled two hours before pickup — but the cancellation fell inside our two-hour grace window so a 50 percent cancellation fee applied. The full trail — creation, reassignment, cancellation, fee application — was visible in a single audit view, with all four actions attributable to the named admin user. That is what we mean by an audit trail: not a database of receipts, but a narrative of what actually happened, in whose name, and when.