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. Records themselves live in the Objects group in your sidebar.

This page covers the Activity section that sits directly under Related on every record page. It is one stream, not two: what your team said about this record and what actually changed on it, in the order it happened. That is what makes a record readable a year later, when the person who set it up has moved on and the reasoning was never written down anywhere else.

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 commenting to be part of your role, and attaching or removing files needs permission to update the record. Who can see and edit an Object explains how an admin sets those controls, Object by Object.

Open the record, scroll to Activity, type in the box and post. Your comment appears straight away with your name and the time, in the same stream as the record's changes. Comments are plain text with mentions, up to 4,000 characters, which is roughly a page.

Write the thing the history cannot record for you. The history already says the stage moved and the date 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 right place for anything you learn after the fact, since a link's own reason is written once when the link is made. See How to link a record to work, and see what points at it for how those connections work.

Bring a colleague in with an @ mention

Type @ and keep typing a name. The menu offers people, tasks, documents, channels, Shopify products and customers, and dates, and it is the same menu chat uses.

Pick one and it becomes a chip in your comment. A person you mention gets a notification that opens this record directly.

That notification is the reliable way to get somebody's attention on a record. 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 with no context attached.

A mention reaches somebody only if they are allowed to see the record. If a colleague never hears about one, check who can view that Object's records, which an admin sets in Settings › Objects and which Who can see and edit an Object walks through.

Edit or delete a comment you posted

Edit and delete appear only on your own comments. Editing rewrites it in place and marks it (edited), so nobody reads a changed comment as though it were the original.

Delete asks "Delete comment? This cannot be undone." before it goes.

Prefer editing. It keeps the thread readable and it is honest about the change. Save delete for a comment posted on the wrong record, and treat it as final when you press it, because a deleted comment does not come back.

Who changed this field, and what was it before?

The history entries in the same feed tell you, in plain words. Each one names the person, the field, the value before and the value after, and when: "Priya changed Status 'received' to 'in progress' · 2h ago". One save makes one entry, however many fields that save touched.

The feed also records the moments that are not field edits: the record being created, a stage moving, and an approval being asked for, granted or refused. Stage moves are covered in How to move a record through its stages and set an owner, which is also where owner changes land in this feed.

Not every change comes from a person, and the feed says so rather than pretending. You will see "The Shopify sync", "An automation", "An agent", "A calculation" and "An import" named as the writer. If a number moved and nobody on the team touched it, this line is where you find out what did.

Times and dates in the feed follow your workspace's own settings. How to read Tideswell's numbers and dates is worth two minutes if a date or a figure in an entry reads differently from how you expected.

Read further back

Press Show earlier at the foot of the feed to pull in older activity, and keep pressing until you reach the beginning. There is no need to scroll and wait; each press loads the next stretch.

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

Attach the evidence to the record

Put the files in the file sections at the bottom of the record page rather than 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.

Two things about those files are worth knowing here, because they decide who reads the evidence you just filed.

Attachments follow the record's own access. Somebody who can view the record can open and download what is there, and sees the section read "No test reports attached." when it is empty. Nobody outside the record's access can reach a file by guessing at a web address.
A file section appears once the Object has a file field. Adding one is a two-minute change for an admin, described in Add a field and pick the right type.