The question always arrives the same way. Something went out wrong, and somebody asks who signed it off. If the answer is a status column reading “Approved”, you do not have an answer — you have the last thing anybody clicked.
What monday keeps
Start here, because for a lot of teams it is enough.
Every board has an activity log. Open an item and you can see who changed which column, from what to what, and when. That is a real audit trail and it is free, and if your question is “when did this move to Approved and who moved it”, monday has already answered it.
Updates are the other half. A comment thread on the item, timestamped, attributed, and not editable into the past. Asking approvers to comment rather than only flip a column costs nothing and is worth doing whatever else you use.
Retention varies by plan, and the log is per item rather than per approval, so reconstructing one decision means reading a list of column changes. Fine for one dispute; painful for an audit of forty.
Where it stops
Three questions the activity log cannot answer, in increasing order of how much they cost.
Which version were they looking at? The log says the status changed to Approved at 14:32. It does not say the drawing attached at 14:32 was revision C, or that revision D replaced it on Thursday. “The file was attached to the item” and “the person who approved it had that version in front of them” are different claims, and only the second one settles anything.
Did they actually open it? Nothing in monday records whether an approver looked at the document before agreeing. That sounds like a detail until somebody says “I never saw that page”, at which point it is the entire question.
Can you hand it to somebody? An audit trail that requires a monday login to read is not much use to an insurer, a customer, or a court. Screenshots of an activity log are not a document anybody accepts.
What to do about it
They are what makes a record hold up, and none of them requires our software.
1. The version, not just the file. Put a revision in the filename and never overwrite — bracket-rev-C.pdf, then bracket-rev-D.pdf beside it. Overwriting a file is what makes an old approval silently wrong.
2. A reason, in writing. Require a comment on anything that is not a plain yes. An approval with no words is a click; an approval that says “dimensions check out against rev C” is a person.
3. Re-approval when the thing changes. If a document is replaced after sign-off, the sign-off no longer covers what is attached. Somebody has to notice, and if that somebody is a person then eventually nobody does.
4. An export. Whatever you keep, keep it in a form you can send to somebody who does not use monday.
Questions
That is a question for your lawyer and the answer depends on your jurisdiction and what is being disputed. What is true generally: a record is worth what its completeness and its provenance are worth. A log that shows a column changed, with no record of what the approver was shown, invites the obvious challenge — that they approved something other than the thing now attached.
Usually not. An e-signature proves identity to a legal standard, which matters for contracts and rarely for internal approvals. Most teams asking this question actually need to prove that a named person agreed to a specific version at a specific time — which is a weaker and much cheaper claim.
Longer than the thing being approved lives. A drawing approved today can be disputed when the part fails in three years. If your approvals live only in a tool's activity log with a retention limit, that is the real answer to how long you have kept them.
What we built
Because a trail nobody outside the tool can read is not evidence of anything.
Any approval prints as a self-contained document: who decided, when, how, which version of each file was in front of them, which documents they had opened before deciding and which they had not. Where a copy of what they were shown could be kept, it is embedded in the file rather than linked, so the record does not depend on anybody’s server still being up.
It says plainly what it does and does not prove. A record that overstates itself is worse than none, because somebody will rely on it.
And when a file is replaced after an approval, Signoff reopens it — keeping the original decision, struck through, as a true record of what that person actually saw.
Three approvals a month, free, with the record included. Enough to see whether it answers the question you are being asked.