Read the QCDS Audit Trail

Each QCDS Completed PDF appends a human-readable Completion Audit Trail. It summarizes the most useful transaction evidence from the immutable Request, final signer values, protected document records, delivery history, and signer-session evidence without replacing the deeper records QCDS retains separately.

Request & Document

The first section identifies the Request and completed document. It can include the Request title/number and public ID, original page count, completed field-value count, created/sent/completed times, Request time zone, sender, immutable Request snapshot SHA-256, frozen source PDF SHA-256, and integrity-manifest SHA-256.

Use these values when you need to associate the PDF with the exact frozen transaction and source document used to create it.

Signer Evidence

Each signing participant is listed with identity/contact context, participant status, and signer ID. QCDS can then show invitation sent/opened times, invitation delivery state/attempts, signing started/completed times, and recorded signer-session evidence such as IP address, browser/OS/device, signer time zone, and approximate location when that information was captured.

CC and completion-recipient roles are not presented as signing participants in this section.

Identity Verification

For a participant with verified Level 2 evidence, the Audit Trail can show the verified identity name, verification method, document type, issuing country, confirmation time, provider, provider reference, and hashes associating the verification with the Request/document context.

If the provider verification was performed in Trial/Test mode, QCDS explicitly labels it as test-only rather than presenting it as production identity evidence.

Signing Actions and Attachments

The Signing Actions section records supported affirmative actions such as Signature, Initials, Signed Date, and checked acknowledgement/consent fields. Signature/Initials evidence can include a SHA-256 value hash.

If Document Attachments were collected, the trail lists the attachment number, label, signer, upload time, whether its PDF presentation was displayed or privacy-obscured, original filename/type/size, and original attachment SHA-256.

Delivery, Chain of Custody, and Integrity

The final sections summarize recorded invitation deliveries, signer-session evidence count, and the finalization condition: required signer fields and routing participants were complete before QCDS generated the protected PDF artifact.

The trail identifies its schema as qcds-completion-audit-v2. The final Completed PDF SHA-256 is calculated after the Audit Trail has been appended and is stored in QCDS's protected artifact record; embedding that final hash inside the same PDF would change the file being hashed.

Community Discussion

Want to compare workflows, share practical tips, or discuss how you use this QCDS feature? Visit the QC Digital Signature Community. For private support, bug reports, account-specific issues, or feature requests, use the QuantaCade support system.