As agents begin to transact, your visibility must increase — not decrease. Real-time events and durable audit logs make that possible.

What to emit on every transaction

Initiator (agent, workflow, or user)
Counterparty (merchant) and MCC/category
Amount, currency, and authorization outcome
Policy decision metadata (rule matched, reason)
Links to artifacts (invoice, receipt, approval trail)

Why webhooks over polling

Near real-time reactions across systems (Slack alerts, approvals, BI)
Lower latency and infrastructure cost
Replayable for recovery and backfills

The audit trail contract

Audit logs should be append-only, tamper-evident, and queryable by agent, merchant, and policy rule. This is how you answer “what happened?” in seconds.

Webhooks + audit trails keep humans in the loop while agents move at machine speed.