Q: What should the timestamp in the audit trail contain? SW: The exact format is defined in your SOP. We know that different countries’ timestamps are formatted differently, sometimes day/month or month/day. This should be configured to your needs on the instrument. It is also important that you don't have only the timestamp and the date. You should also have the time zone where the instrument is located. For global companies, you may transfer results from different sites in different countries and this lets you have the chronological order for the results by including which time zones it was recorded in.