Audit trail information is written to database tables AuditEvents, AuditObjects and AuditArguments, supported by lookup tables AuditTypes and UserProfilePropertyTypes. Activating an item could result in an audit event record specifying the user and date/time of the event, and an audit object record specifying a content version record. Importing a set of items could result in one audit event record representing the import, and several audit object records, one per imported item. An audit entry is an audit object record together with its audit event record. Audit arguments store values for an audit entry, used as arguments for a format string when presenting the audit entry. Audit types define possible audit entry types, such as "WF_ACTIVATE_ITEM".

Audit information can be retrieved, localized and formatted; resulting in a string description per audit entry. Alternatively it is possible to write queries that associate the audit information with their original objects, not limited to content versions or to contents records.