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	The fee for the act, as priced at booking — see below
Witness	What the witness did — never invited, invited and never joined, joined but gone before signing, or signed. Recorded as observed at the act, not as assumed at admission
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.

What "fee collected" means, and what it does not

The register records the fee for the act — the amount priced at booking for the notarisation itself. It is not the amount the client was charged: that figure carries the payment service charge and the VAT on it, and neither is money you charged for a notarial act. A register that mixed them in would overstate every fee you have ever charged, in the one document a regulator reads to find out.

The amount charged has not been discarded. It stays on the payment and on your payout, where it belongs, and both remain reconcilable to the act.

Two consequences worth knowing:

• The entry does not wait for payment. It records what the act was priced at, the moment the act completes. A session whose payout is still pending shows its full fee here, not zero, and nothing changes it later when the money settles.
• ₦0 is a real entry, not a missing one. A waived or pro-bono act records zero because zero is what you charged. If you see ₦0 against an act you charged for, that is a fault worth reporting rather than a display quirk.

Your Earnings page answers a different question — what you were paid and what is still to come — so its figures will not match the register line for line, and should not.

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.

Date filters are inclusive of both days you pick, in Nigerian civil days. A range ending today contains today's acts, including one performed at 23:50 this evening. This is worth knowing because it used to be otherwise: a range run "up to today" silently omitted today, on screen and in every export.

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.

Checking it yourself

The Entry hash column shows the start of each entry's hash; hover it to see the full hash and the one it chains from.

Press Verify register to walk the whole chain now. The platform re-computes every entry's hash from its stored contents and checks that each one still follows from its predecessor, then tells you how many entries were checked and gives you the current head of your chain.

If the check stops, it names the entry it stopped at and says which of two very different things happened: that an entry no longer matches its hash — the record has been altered — or that the entry was written under a newer hashing format than the service reading it, which is a deployment matter and not a problem with your record. The wording is deliberately not interchangeable.

If the check itself cannot run, you are told that too, rather than shown nothing.

What this proves, and what it does not

It proves the register is consistent with itself: nothing edited, nothing removed, every entry following from the last. It cannot prove the whole chain was not rewritten by someone with database access. For that, record your chain head — shown with every passing check — somewhere outside the platform, so a later head can be traced back to it.

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.

Proving it to someone who does not trust us

A verification result computed by the platform is still the platform's word for it. So the export also carries the recipe: the exact list of fields that go into an entry's hash, in the exact order, and how they are joined.

That is enough for a recipient with no account, no access and no reason to trust NotariseIt to take an entry from your export, compute the hash themselves, and see that it matches the one printed. Tamper-evidence that only the platform can check is not tamper-evidence.

Older entries hash over fewer fields

Entries created before witness recording was added hash over the original field list; newer ones include the witness line. Each entry states which scheme it used, and the recipe covers both — so an old entry still verifies, and nobody has to guess why it hashes differently from a recent one. Nothing was recomputed or rewritten: entries are fixed for the life of the record.

Acts conducted over several sittings

An act spread across several appearances produces one entry, appended when the act completes — not one per sitting. Three sittings, one line in your register, because it was one notarial act.

The entry carries two dates: when the act commenced, and when it completed. On a multi-session act these can be weeks apart, and the entry appears in the chain at its completion date rather than its commencement.

That means an act begun in September and finished in October sits in the register after acts you began and finished in between. It looks out of order and it is not: the register is a record of completed acts, in the order they were completed. The commencement date is there so the span is visible rather than hidden.

The entry also names each appearance — when it was held and who appeared — so the register and the certificate tell the same story.