An audit trail system allows a user to configure and view an audit trail of changes that have been made to various types of information that can be accessed by one or more users in a network of computer systems. The various types of information are grouped in business components. A user can select particular business components, and fields within a business component, to be audited. The audit trail shows who has accessed the business component, the operation performed, when the operation was performed, and how the value of at least a portion of the business component was changed. Users can track when operations such as update, create, delete, and copy are performed on the selected business components, as well as track which employee modified a certain field and the data that has been changed. Users can also reconstruct records that existed at a certain point of time. Options to restrict access to audit trails by selected areas of responsibility, positions, and/or employee identifiers, can also be included. Audit trails can be written to one or more local files and periodically imported into a central database.