I don't know if these requirements are standard or not but I'm wondering is there a solution out there which can do the following:
I rather not have to code this for every table. I'm wondering if there is a solution you can install on top of SQL Server which will do this for you?
There are many ways to do that; it depends which version of SQL Server you are using.
Here are few
Audit trail with shadow table and trigger Here is the link
Also you can consider to use SQL Server 2008 Audit feature Here is the link
You can also use CLR triggers, which may or may not be better suited for your purpose over TSQL ones.
I would credit the second link to this post instead (since it was written 4 years before and they look almost the same): simple-talk.com/sql/database-administration/… Anyway, it is a quite old script that should be reviewed and updated to support schemas and unicode data types (nvarchar, nchar...)
Please visit following link for number of approaches as well as their pros and cons: stackoverflow.com/questions/10060408/…
Some of the suggested codes on the net, assume that you're auditing tables with singular column names (ie: field names without spaces like FirstName and not [First Name]). If you have tables like the later, most of the scripts won't work. I had to rename my columns to single worded versions.