How to comment on a record and see its history

Discuss a record where it lives, and see who changed which field and what it was before.

Every record you open belongs to an Object, one of the kinds of record your team defines, such as Fabric trials or Repairs. Objects are built by an admin in Settings › Objects, and What is an Object? explains what they are for. Each Object has a row in the Objects area of the left menu.

This page covers the Activity section that sits directly under Related on every record page. It is one stream: what your team said about the record and what changed on it, oldest at the top and newest at the bottom. That is what makes a record readable a year later, when the person who set it up has moved on.

Before you start

Everyone who can view an Object's records sees the whole feed on them, comments and history alike. Writing a comment needs the Leave comments row in Settings › Permissions, and attaching or removing files needs Update on the Object. How to set who can see and edit an Object explains how an admin sets those, Object by Object.

Open the record, scroll to Activity, type in the box under the feed and press Comment. Cmd+Enter (Ctrl+Enter on Windows) sends it too. Your comment appears at the foot of the feed with your name and the time.

A comment takes up to 4,000 characters, which is roughly a page. Write the thing the history cannot record for you. The history already says a field changed; what it cannot say is why.

On a Fairgreen Golf Co. fabric trial, the useful comment is "Portside's second swatch failed pilling at 4,000 rubs, holding the spring piqué until they resubmit", not "moved to on hold". A comment is also the place for anything you learn after a link was made, since a link's reason is written once: see How to link a record to work, and see what points at it.

Bring a colleague in with an @ mention

Type @ and keep typing a name. The menu is the same one chat uses, grouped as People, Documents, Tasks, Records, Editorials, Products, Collections, Customers, Channels and Dates, so you can also tag another record, a task or a Shopify product.

A mention you pick shows in the box as plain text, such as "@Priya Raman". It turns into a chip once the comment is posted. How to tag people, tasks, documents and products covers the menu in full.

Who hears about a comment?

Everyone you mention, and everyone who has already commented on the record. Each of them gets a notification in their Inbox that opens the record directly. If you edit a comment to add a mention, only the newly mentioned person hears about it.

Mentioning Priya on the fabric trial puts the record in front of her with the sentence that explains why, rather than a bare "can you look at this" in a channel. A person hears about a comment only if they can view that Object's records. If a colleague never hears about one, check their access, which How to set who can see and edit an Object walks through.

Edit or delete a comment you posted

Hover one of your own comments to see the pencil (edit) and bin (delete) icons. Editing rewrites the comment in place and marks it (edited), so nobody reads a changed comment as the original.

Delete asks "Delete comment?" with "This cannot be undone." Prefer editing, which keeps the thread readable. Make sure before you press Delete, because a deleted comment does not come back.

Who changed this field, and what was it before?

The history lines in the same feed tell you. Each one names who made the change, the field, the value before and the value after, and when: "Priya changed Colour Navy → Forest green · 2h ago". A blank value reads "empty", and a yes or no field reads "yes" or "no".

One save makes one line, however many fields that save touched. The feed also records the record being created ("Priya created "Spring 26 piqué"") and every status move ("Priya moved this from "received" to "in progress""). Status is covered in How to set a record's status and owner.

Not every change comes from a person, and the feed names what made it. You will see "An automation", "An agent", "A calculation" or "An import" in place of a name. If a number moved and nobody on the team touched it, this line is where you find out what did.

How are times shown in the feed?

Recent entries read "just now", "5m ago", "2h ago" or "3d ago". After a week they show the date, such as "Oct 3", with the year added once it is not this year.

Times follow the clock on the device you are reading on. How to read Tideswell's numbers and dates is worth two minutes if a date or a figure reads differently from how you expected.

Read further back

Press Show earlier at the top of the feed, just under the Activity heading. Older entries load above the ones already there, and you can keep pressing until you reach the beginning.

A feed that reads "Nothing here yet." has nothing to show yet. It fills in from the next comment or edit onwards, so leave a comment on a quiet record now if you want it to have a readable trail.

Attach the evidence to the record

Put files in the file sections at the bottom of the record page rather than describing them in a comment. The pilling test report, the before and after photos of a repair, the signed quote from the mill: each goes in the section an admin set up for it. How to add and edit a record covers the upload itself.

Attachments follow the record's own access. Anyone who can view the record can open and download what is there. An empty section says so, for example "No lab report attached."
A file section appears once the Object has a file field. Adding one is a quick change for an admin, described in How to add a field and pick its type.