Maintaining an effective and comprehensive audit trail for an integrated impact assessment is vital for a number of reasons:

1. The process of doing an assessment is often complicated, involves many different individuals, and may include a number of false turns and adjustments; to ensure that the process does not become chaotic, it is essential that every step is properly recorded, and justification for every decision can be reviewed if necessary. 
2. Integrated assessments often have far-reaching implications for policy-makers and other users.  If they are to be convinced that the results are valid and merit a response, then they need to be able to scrutinise the procedures used in the assessment, and satisfy themselves that the decisions taken in the process were valid.
3. Experience in doing integrated assessments is scarce, and we can all learn from what others have done; providing access to clear documentation about what was done, and to details explaining the rationale, helps others learn good practice in integrated assessment.

Specific standards and tools for documentation of integrated assessments have not been established, and the methods used need to be developed to work within the context of the assessment and organisations involved.  Useful ways of ensuring effective documentation, however, include:

1. Annotating the assessment protocol (in the form of cross-referenced annexes and supplements) to provide specific detail on the decisions or changes in approach made during the process, and the methods used at each step in the analysis;
2. Supplementing the assessment protocol with a clear critical path diagram, and annotating this to record key decisions, methods and outcomes;
3. Maintaining a rigorous 'versioning' procedure (including naming and archiving) for all elements of the assessment (e.g. conceptual models, data files, analytical models, results) so that the steps involved in reaching the final outputs of the assessent can always be retraced;
4. Developing comprehensive metadata for all derived materials (including both intermediate and final results), which dscribe the procedures used to generate the information.