How to visualize versioned data?
I work at a SaaS company that has a product for entering accounting transaction data. We are building out a new feature for visualizing versioned data, and I am needing some help on how this could be implemented. Here are some important pieces of information:
- The data is transactional in nature (similar to how your check registrar works)
- The data exists in one of two states (active or inactive)
- There is only one active version of a transaction at a time
- There can be many inactive versions of the transactions (this is due to edits and deletions)
The problem we have is enabling people with the ability to see how transactions have changed over time. They need to know this because part of their job is understanding the current and past state of the data. Right now, they are able to easily see the current state. They struggle with seeing the past state. This is due to the transitive nature of the data. Each edit results in a new version with the previous version becoming inactive.
I want to build a GUI that shows how the data has transformed over time. We have audit tables in our database that show previous states of the data. This information, for non-technical people, is generally difficult to consume. How might we represent the changing state of the data in a meaningful way to our users?