Perhaps some of you can lend a hand with the problem I keep running up against. I am sure some of you must work in corporate environments and had this happen to you.

Background:
I have developed a VFP database of kidney patients. Amoung many things it stores the treatment date for patients who come into the hospital. At the end of each accounting period a report is sent to our Finance dept with the number of patients we have treated. Finance wants to project our growth. The system was built to support clinical needs. Sending reports to Finance is a fringe benefit.

The problem:
Aftering send the reports, our clerical and medical staff can go back and alter data that was entered incorrectly, missed or for some other reason. At a later point Finance was come back to use and ask for much more detailed data (like race, city and other). Inevitable the numbers don't match and they get their nose out of joint. Finally, this has come to a head and they are jumping up and down and demand and answer why the numbers don't match. The Finance dept has powerful friends.

A possible solution:
- make it more difficult to change historical data after accounting periods. In fact they will need to come to me. I will then resend any reports to Finance
- put a date stamp on records to tell if they have been modified after their original creation date.

Suggestions:
What do others do in cases like this? I am more looking for a concept more than a technical solution. It is sort of like we want to "close the books" then have an audit trail to track any changes.
We certainly don't want to discourage anyone for correcting data since clinically we want to know what "actually" happenend.