One of the most challenging situations, in a multi-user environment, is how to keep track of what has been modified or deleted. X-Cross offers a very advanced and extremely functional technology to solve this problem.
The solutions that are usually offered
No edit – no delete
Some ERPs “solve” this problem simply preventing the user from editing and deleting anything in some sections of the program.
This “brute force” approach can obviosly “eliminate” the problem, but at the price of a dramatic reduction of the usability of the software.
Saving date, time and user of the last modification
This approach is clearly insufficient, as it only stores the last change and not the previous ones, and it is not possible to see what has been changed.
Saving date, time and user of all changes
Better than the previous solution, but still not enough: we know all the users who have made changes, but not what they have changed.
The X-Cross solution
In X-Cross, the modify and delete functions are always allowed, even though the setting can be configured to deny the edit and delete privileges for groups of users.
The versions of complex objects
In a complex object, e.g. a commercial document or an accoun ting transactions, that is composed of more than one table, even to save the previous versions for each table is not enough.
For example, in an invoice, if we add an invoice line a new record is inserted, and there is no previous version; in fact, wa did modify the whole invoice.
The CrossModel multi-level data objects can save the previous versions of any complex object as a whole (e.g. an invoice, quotation, accounting transaction) that is modified or deleted. The change can be also adding a record in a subtable, like the invocie lines with respect to the invoice header.
Of course, this happens only if the versioning is enabled for the section.
In this way, not only we know who modified what, but we can see how the modified-deleted object was before the edit or delete.
Look for the differences
Examining two versions of the same document, it could be difficult to see which information has been changed.
To avoid this problem X-Cross can, if requested, identify and highlight all the differences between two versions of the same object.