Your spreadsheet is not a compliance system

Every compliance program starts as a spreadsheet, and most of them work — right up until someone asks for evidence. The auditor's question is never "did you have a list?" It's "show me that this license was reviewed before expiry, who approved it, and when."

A spreadsheet holds state, not history. It can tell you today's value of a cell; it cannot tell you who changed it, what it said before, or whether the change happened before or after the deadline. Edit history in shared sheets is shallow, unreadable at scale, and trivially lost when a file is copied.

The fix isn't more discipline — it's moving from a document to a system of record. Three capabilities matter. Immutable audit logging: every action recorded with actor and timestamp, not editable after the fact. Versioned changes: the full before/after of every edit, with the ability to see the item exactly as it stood on any date. And workflow-enforced sign-off: approvals captured in the system as structured decisions, not screenshots of email threads.

When those three exist, audit prep collapses from weeks of archaeology to an export. The deadline register, the reminder history, the approval chain — it's all one query, because it was all captured as it happened.

That's the design principle behind Cadence's audit trail: nothing about proving compliance should require reconstructing the past. The system remembers, so your team doesn't have to.