Your Electronic Journal

The Notaries Public Professional Practice Regulations 2026 (Reg 14), made under the Notaries Public Act 2023, require every notary to maintain a notarial journal of all notarisation acts and to retain records for a minimum of 6 years. NotariseIt generates and maintains your journal automatically — no manual entry is required.

How journal entries are created

A journal entry is created automatically when you complete a session. Each entry contains:

Field	Content
Entry number	Sequential and unique within your register, assigned when the act completes and fixed for the life of the record
Date and time	West Africa Time (WAT)
Parties	Client name(s) as recorded at the time of the act
Method of identification	How you satisfied yourself as to identity
Document type	Nature of the notarial act, as selected at booking
Fee collected	Amount and currency
Session outcome	Completed, cancelled
Duration	Length of the session in minutes
Certificate reference	Serial number of the certificate issued for the act
Recording hash	SHA-256 of the session recording, where archival had completed
Entry hash / previous hash	The tamper-evidence chain — see below

These are the details Reg 14(2) requires: enough to identify the parties, the documents, the method of identification, and the date and nature of the act.

Viewing your journal

1. Go to My Journal in the sidebar, under PRACTICE.
2. Your entries are listed newest first, by entry number.
3. Filter by document type or date range.

Each row shows the entry in full — there is no separate detail view to open, and nothing is hidden behind a click. If you need more than the table gives you, use the PDF or CSV export below: the export carries every field the register holds.

Journal integrity

Your journal is tamper-evident. Each entry stores a hash of its own contents, computed over the hash of the entry before it — so the entries form a chain, and each one commits to everything that came before.

Altering a historical entry changes its hash, which breaks the link to every entry after it. So does deleting one, because entry numbers must run unbroken. Either way the break points at the entry that changed rather than merely telling you something, somewhere, is wrong.

Journal entries cannot be edited or deleted once created — there is no mechanism in the platform to do so, for you or for us.

Compliance oversight

The NotariseIt compliance team has read-only access to your journal for regulatory oversight purposes. You cannot restrict this access.

Exporting your journal

To export your journal for submission or record-keeping:

1. Go to My Journal in the sidebar.
2. Select a date range.
3. Choose a format:
   • Export CSV — a spreadsheet, for your own records or your accountant.
   • Export PDF — a printable register, for submission.

Both are available on every plan.

The export carries each entry's hash and the hash it chains from, along with the current head of your chain and a verification result computed at the moment you download it. That means an exported journal can be checked against the register it came from — without it, an export is just a list, and a recipient has no way to tell whether it matches your records.

The verification result is printed whether it passed or failed. An export that quietly omitted a failed integrity check would be worse than no export at all, because it would look like evidence.