Published
The consent log: what a person agreed to, and when
Every consent is a separate entry — type, given or withdrawn, the version of the wording, the channel and the time. Entries are only added, and the owner has a screen to read them.
An inquiry used to carry a single tick box — "agrees to marketing": yes or no. It did not answer the question that actually gets asked months later: what exactly did this person agree to, when, under which wording, and through which channel. The system now holds a consent log, and every consent sits in it as an entry of its own.
An entry keeps the type of consent — processing of data, marketing, passing lead quality back to the advertising accounts; whether it was given or withdrawn; the version of the policy wording the person saw at that moment; the channel — a form on the site, an import, spoken over the phone, a setting of the office; the time; the author, if a member of staff created the entry; and blurred technical markers, such as the prefix of an IP address and nothing more. Entries are only ever added: they cannot be edited or deleted, and the history stays whole.
Most entries appear on their own, with no extra step:
- when an inquiry arrives from a form — the version of the policy wording is fixed at the moment of submission, not taken from whatever the site will say a year from now;
- when inquiries are imported from a file;
- when the owner switches the passing of lead quality to advertising on or off — the office's own consent goes into the log as well.
A member of staff with the CRM management right can record a consent given in conversation straight from the record — during a call, say, when the person says they do not mind being contacted. That action is written to the access log too.
The office owner has a Settings → Consents screen, read-only: filters by type, by channel and by period, and a search by inquiry number, so the question "what did this person agree to" is answered on one screen. Opening the screen is itself recorded in the access log.
Two things deliberately stay as they were. The "agrees to marketing" tick box has not gone from the inquiry — it is now derived from the latest marketing entry in the log rather than standing on its own. And an inquiry deleted at a person's request leaves no hole in the log: its entries are made anonymous instead of disappearing.
The result is short to state: what a person agreed to and when now has an answer with a date and a wording behind it, rather than the memory of whoever spoke to them.
Want to see this on your own office's inquiries?