Billing & Payments

Everything you have paid for, in one place: Dashboard → Billing.

What you will find there

• Every notarisation payment you have made
• The status of each — paid, pending, refunded or failed
• Refunds, including how much was returned
• Filters, so you can narrow a long history down to what you are looking for

Clients have no subscription

Billing shows your payment history. There is nothing to manage — no plan, no renewal, no card on file. Subscription plans apply to notaries and organisations, not to clients.

A payment marked Pending

A row marked Pending carries a Pay now button. That is the same control that appears on the booking itself, and it does the same thing: it checks the payment with Paystack first, confirms the booking if the money had already arrived, and only takes you back to Paystack if nothing was received.

Bank transfers and USSD payments are the usual reason a row sits on Pending for a while — the money reaches us after you have left the checkout page. There is no harm in pressing Pay now to find out; you cannot be charged twice by doing so.

Pending means nothing has been taken from your account. The row shows what the booking would cost, not a charge you have incurred, so there is no refund owed while it sits there.

You have 30 minutes from booking to complete it, extended up to an hour if Paystack tells us a payment is still going through. After that the booking is cancelled and the button becomes Book again — the slot has gone back to the notary and cannot be paid for.

See If your payment is still pending for what happens in each case, including a payment that arrives after the booking's slot has been released.

What you are charged

See Booking a Session for the full breakdown and a worked example. In short, each booking is:

notarisation fee + service charge + VAT on the service charge + payment processing fee, plus a small per-person fee for any witnesses you add, and an attendance fee for any signatories whose cost you choose to cover.

Those per-person rates are set on the platform and can change, so they are not printed here — the booking screen shows the current amount for each person you add, before you pay, and the total updates as you add or remove them.

The full breakdown is shown before you pay, and the Final amount due is the figure Paystack will charge — they are the same number.

Refunds

When you cancel a booking, what comes back depends on how far ahead you cancel. The cancellation policy sets out the tiers, and the exact naira figure is shown on the cancellation screen before you confirm.

Two things worth knowing:

• The service charge, its VAT and the payment processing fee are not refunded. The service charge and VAT cover platform access and are retained whenever you cancel. The processing fee is Paystack's, taken on the transaction itself — see the note below.
• The amount refunded is shown against the original payment in Billing, so a partial refund reads as a partial refund rather than as though the whole booking came back to you.

If a document is not notarised

A session can finish with some of your documents notarised and others not. That is a normal outcome — a notary may decline a document, or you may run out of time — and you are not charged for a notarial act that did not happen.

The notarisation fee for each document that was not notarised is refunded. The refund is worked out per document from the same per-document prices you were shown when you booked, and it is initiated automatically once the session completes. You will receive an email setting out which documents were notarised, which were not, and the amount coming back.

What is not refunded is the same three charges as always: the service charge, its VAT and the processing fee. Those relate to the session, which took place.

If a document was declined and you want it notarised, you book it again as a new session. Nothing about the refund prevents that, and no penalty applies.

If a notary declines a document on professional grounds

A notary may decline to notarise a document — because they cannot satisfy themselves it is genuine, cannot confirm the signer's identity, or is not satisfied the signer understood it or acted freely. That judgement is the reason a notary exists, and it is not something the platform overrides.

Where that happens, a review fee is retained for that document and the rest of its notarisation fee is refunded. The notary examined the document, verified identity and reached a decision; that work was done. You are told which document it was, why, and the exact amount retained.

Where a document is declined for any other reason — it needs correcting, the notary had a conflict of interest, or you withdrew it — your fee for that document is refunded in full.

Refunds are processed through Paystack and typically appear within 5–10 business days.

The payment processing fee is not returned

Paystack keeps its processing fee on a refunded transaction. That fee is not part of what NotariseIt received, so it is not ours to return.

Receipts

Your booking confirmation email is your receipt. It arrives when the payment settles, with the subject “Booking confirmed — <your notary> on <date>”, and it lists the fee breakdown line by line together with the Paystack reference.

There is no separate email with “receipt” in the subject, and nothing to download from Billing — that one email is the document. Keep it.

The amount shown against each payment in Billing is the amount charged to your card, processing fee included, so a line here matches a line on your bank statement without arithmetic. The processing fee is itemised underneath it.

Something looks wrong

If a payment, refund or amount does not look right, raise it through Report an Issue in the sidebar and choose Platform / General Issue. Include the Paystack reference from Billing — it is the fastest way for support to find the transaction.

When other people are signing

The notarisation fee is charged once. One document is one notarial act however many sittings it takes to collect the signatures. Three people signing at three different times does not cost three times one person signing.

Each sitting carries an attendance fee, which pays for the notary's time in the room with that person. It is the notary's fee, not a platform charge, and it is not a second notarisation fee — the wording on your receipt is the wording to rely on.

You choose who pays, per person. At booking you either cover a signatory's attendance fee or leave them to pay their own. What you cover is added to what you pay at checkout; what you do not is billed to them before they can be admitted.

What you are charged at booking

Your own notarisation fee and session, plus one attendance fee for each signatory you chose to cover — and nothing for the ones you did not. If you cover two people out of three, you pay two attendance fees and the third person pays their own.

Refunds, and the one asymmetry worth knowing

These two look similar and are opposites. They are the commonest source of surprise, so they are set out together deliberately.

If your notary cannot complete the notarisation, everything comes back — including the attendance fees for sittings that were actually held. The notary could not finish; nobody should be out of pocket for that.

If the document simply runs out of time, nothing comes back for the sittings that happened. The notary attended them and conducted them, and that is what the fee paid for. Only what was never used is refunded.

The platform service charge, the VAT on it and the payment processing fee are never refunded in either case, as set out above.