Appearance
Signing & Certificates
Placing signing fields
Before the client signs, you set up the signing fields on the document:
- In the session sidebar, click the document you want to work on. It opens in the main panel headed Place Signing Fields.
- Pick who the field is for from the participant list, then choose the field type:
- Signature — where the client, witness, or you sign
- Initials — for page-by-page initials
- Date — auto-filled with the session date
- Text and Number — for something the party types
- Seal — where your digital seal is applied
- Choose whether it must be completed. Required is the default and is what you want almost always. Optional is for a box a party may use rather than must — a middle name, a second address line, an elected clause. An optional field left blank does not hold up the seal.
- Click the document where the field should sit. Drag to reposition, or use the corner handle to resize.
Required resets after every field you place. That is on purpose: an "optional" setting left switched on four fields ago is how a signature ends up skippable without anybody choosing it.
Your own marks are always required. Your seal and your signature are the act, so the Optional setting does not apply to them.
Use Optional to avoid a dead end
A required field the party cannot complete will stop you sealing the act, and once the client has confirmed you cannot remove a field somebody has signed. If you are not certain a box is needed, place it as Optional — you can still remove it, and it cannot trap the act either way.
There is no Save step. Each field is saved the moment you place it, and a field you delete is gone immediately. This is deliberate — a session is a live event, and an unsaved layout that a browser refresh could discard is not something to be holding during one.
On the placed-fields list each row shows whose field it is, and an unfilled optional one reads optional rather than pending — so it is clear at a glance that nobody is holding you up.
Deleting a field does not delete a signature that was made on it. If someone had already signed there, the field goes and the record of their signature stays — marked as superseded, with the time it was made. Tidying up the layout is not a way to unmake something that happened, and it should not be: the register has to show what took place, not what the document ended up looking like.
You can place fields for multiple signatories — the client, any witnesses, and yourself.
Move between documents freely
The document list is a set of tabs, not a queue. You can place marks on document three before touching document one, seal every document at the end, or go back to a document you thought you had finished. Nothing locks behind you.
The page rail
Under the document is a strip of page chips — one per page, grouped by document. Each chip shows what that page carries: ● a seal, ✎ a signature, ⓝ a printed name, T a typed value. A page with nothing on it shows a dash.
That dash is the point of the rail. If you are sealing every page of a five-page deed, pages 1, 2, 3 and 5 will each show a seal and page 4 will show a dash, and the gap is obvious at a glance.
Only you know what the document needs
The platform cannot tell that page 4 wanted a seal — nothing in the file says so. The rail makes a gap visible; it cannot make it impossible. Check the rail before you finalise.
Beside the document is the Outstanding panel: every document, what is left on each, and a click that takes you to the field. Your client sees the same panel showing only their own fields.
The signing flow
Order does not matter. Place marks, sign them, move them, remove them, in any sequence you like — yours before the client's, the seal before the signatures, document three before document one. Any order that ends with everything signed produces the same instrument.
This is a change from how the platform used to work. It previously insisted that clients signed, then witnesses, then you; a session that departed from that order could strand a field and there was no way to undo a signature.
Changing your mind
Any signed mark can be taken back before the session is finalised. Open the field and choose Unsign — the mark comes off the document and the field is free to be signed again, moved, or removed.
Taking a signature back does not erase it from the record. The register keeps that it was made and that it was withdrawn, with both times. Someone who signs at 14:32, sees it is in the wrong place and signs again at 14:34 did two things, and the record says two things happened.
When you are finished placing
Press Ask client to confirm. That single press is what closes placement and puts the question to the room — there is no separate step before it.
- If something is outstanding, you are told exactly what — document, page and field — before anything is asked of anybody.
- If a document has nothing on it at all, you are told before anything is committed. Some documents legitimately carry no marks; the platform asks rather than assumes, and you confirm you meant it.
- Optional fields left blank are not counted as outstanding. Nobody owed them.
You can reopen placement at any point after asking, including while waiting for an answer.
If you see "I am ready to finalise"
There is a separate I am ready to finalise control that appears in one situation: after a client has declined to confirm and placement has reopened. Press it when you have made your changes and you are ready to ask again. On an ordinary act you will not see it, and you do not need it — Ask client to confirm does both jobs.
Asking the client — and everybody else who signed
One button asks everyone in the sitting. The client reviews every document and confirms or declines, and so does each co-signatory on the call: they are being asked about the marks they made, and until now nobody asked them at all.
- Confirmed — you complete the session and the documents are finalised.
- Declined — they give a reason, placement reopens, and you can adjust and ask again. There is no limit on how many times.
Your panel lists each co-signatory and what they said — Confirmed, Declined with their reason in their own words, or Waiting. A party who signed nothing shows as Signed nothing rather than as somebody you are waiting for.
Closing waits on the people who signed in THIS sitting. A co-signatory who signed at their own sitting weeks ago answered then; they are not asked again, and they cannot hold up a later sitting. If somebody on this call has not confirmed, the close is refused and names them. You can still proceed — a party who signed and then dropped off the call cannot be made to answer — but you must tick an acknowledgement, and the record shows you closed without them.
A confirmation locks that party's own marks. Once somebody has confirmed, their signed fields cannot be removed; fields belonging to parties who have not confirmed stay editable, so one person confirming does not freeze the whole page.
The client's confirmation is the one thing that cannot be skipped. Everything else about the order is yours to choose.
What a wait looks like
Placing a seal, applying a signature, finalising a document and completing a session all involve work on the server, and five to twenty seconds is normal. On a slow connection it can be longer.
Do not click twice
A control that has not responded yet is still working. Clicking again does not hurry it and can place a second mark you did not intend — an accidental field is easy to remove, but easier not to create.
Every control that does work of this kind shows a pending state. If it is showing one, it has your instruction.
The other thing worth knowing: after you sign, your mark can take a few seconds to appear on your client's screen, and theirs on yours. Nothing has gone wrong. Say so aloud rather than clicking again — see below.
Talking to the room
Communication is part of the act, not etiquette around it. A remote session has none of the ordinary cues of a room, so the things a notary would do without thinking in person have to be done deliberately here.
- Greet everyone and state what you are doing. Say which document you are on and what the act is.
- Tell people when a field is theirs, and where it is. "There's a signature for you on page two, near the bottom." Their panel shows it, but being told is faster than finding it.
- Narrate the waits. "That's applying now, give it a moment." Silence during a fifteen-second wait reads as something being broken.
- Confirm satisfaction aloud before you click Ask client. The prompt should confirm a conversation you have already had, not replace it. A client who is asked to confirm on screen without being asked in the room is being asked to agree to something nobody discussed.
While you work
Client signature
A client signs at least once on every document — that is what identifies the document as theirs — and may sign in several places. Typed or handwritten both count.
The client sees the document with their assigned fields highlighted in blue. They can sign in two ways:
Typed signature
- The client types their full name.
- They choose a style from five font options and set the size.
- They confirm their intent and click Sign — the signature image is placed on the field.
The styles offered are selected for stroke weight rather than for how they look on screen, so they survive printing and photocopying. A name too long for the field is scaled down to fit rather than being clipped.
Handwritten signature via QR code
- Toggle Require handwritten on the field in the signing field editor.
- During the session, the client clicks Show QR Code in their signing panel.
- They scan it on their phone — a handwriting pad opens.
- They draw their signature and tap Submit.
- The signature is transmitted back to the session in real time.
Witness signature
Witnesses follow the same signing process as clients, on their assigned fields.
A witness who is not there does not hold up the session. If one was invited and has left, or never arrived, you are told before you finalise and you can proceed. What the record states is what actually happened — that they signed, that they were present when you completed the act, that they attended and had left by then, or that they never attended. A session with no witness at all says nothing about witnesses, which is different from saying nothing.
Wrong document type? Fix it before you seal
If the AI pre-check tells you a document is not the type it was booked as, you can correct it from the same panel — see Correcting a document booked under the wrong type. The corrected type is what reaches the certificate, and only while the seal is still off.
Acts that take more than one session
Where a document has several signatories and they are not all free at once, the notarisation is spread across several short sittings. It is still one notarial act: one fee, one certificate, one journal entry, one filing. You conduct every sitting of it, and an act never transfers to another notary once it has begun.
The instrument workspace
Your diary shows sittings. It cannot show you where a document has got to, because an act with three appearances appears there as three separate rows.
The workspace is the other view. Open it from the reference chip on any appointment — a small tag reading something like NI-2026-XXXXXXXX. It carries:
- The appearances — held and still to come
- Who must sign, and what each person still owes: not confirmed, not booked, not verified, not paid
- The documents, and separately the identity evidence
- The jurisdiction finding under s.6(1), with the locations each party declared
- The deadline, and how long is left
The chip is a link on both the card and the list view. Clicking it opens the workspace; clicking the row itself still opens the appointment as before.
Placing fields ahead of each signatory
You do not have to wait until somebody is in the room to place their fields. Preparing them in advance is the better habit — it means a sitting is spent witnessing rather than laying out a page while somebody watches.
This works across sittings, not just before the first one. With the client on the call you can lay out where each co-signatory will sign, and their marks are waiting for them when they attend their own session. In practice that is a conversation with the client: they know what the document is for and who should sign where.
A party who attends a different sitting is marked in the list. In Assign To they carry a later session chip, so you can tell them apart from the people on the call with you. Their unsigned marks read waiting rather than pending on the placed-fields list — pending means somebody you are waiting on right now, and you are not.
A mark placed for somebody who is not in the room is optional by default. It can be left blank without holding up the seal, so laying out a page speculatively cannot strand the act. You can still set it to Required when you place it if the party must complete it. Either way you can remove it later, right up until they sign it.
Once a party has attended, nothing new can be placed for them. The refusal is explicit and names them: "has already attended their own session, so a new mark cannot be placed for them here — they would never see it, and it would hold the act open." If they genuinely need to sign something further, they have to be brought back for another appearance — see Calling somebody back.
And their signature is no longer yours to remove. Once somebody has signed and their sitting has ended, that mark stays: you cannot delete a co-signatory's or the client's signature from a later party's session. Unfilled marks you placed for somebody still to attend remain removable.
They are told. When a sitting closes leaving marks waiting for a party who has not attended yet, that party — and only that party — gets an email saying something is waiting for them to sign. It names no figure and quotes nothing from the document; it says a mark is waiting and points them at their own portal.
If the document needs signing in a particular order
Some instruments genuinely do — a guarantee that should follow the principal obligation, a deed where one party signs on the strength of another's signature already being there.
The platform does not enforce an order. Any party on an act may sign at any point, and the document is the same whichever sequence they take. That is deliberate: it is what lets three people book three times without anybody having to coordinate them, and it is why nobody is ever left unable to act because somebody else has not.
An order comes from the order of the sittings, not from a rule. So where you need one, arrange it:
- Take the appearances in the order you want. You control your own diary, so the simplest version is to schedule them one after another in sequence and tell the client which order you are working in.
- Restrict what is bookable. A party can only take a slot you have published. Opening the later parties' availability only after the first has appeared is blunt, but it works, and it needs nothing from anybody else.
- Ask a party to move. A signatory can reschedule their own appearance, and the client can ask them to. If somebody has booked ahead of the party who should sign first, that is the fix.
Say so out loud. Whichever route you take, the sequence lives in your head and in your diary — the platform will not announce it, and the parties cannot see a reason behind the times they were offered. Tell the client what order you need and why, and let them pass it on.
The client has one channel for that: when they name each signatory at booking they can attach a short note, which travels with the invitation and appears on that person's own page. It is the only place a party is told anything beyond a time. It is also only a message — it configures nothing — so treat it as a way of making your sequence visible, never as a control that enforces it.
It is an arrangement, not a guarantee
Nothing refuses a signature that arrives out of turn. If a party's slot falls earlier than intended, they will be able to sign at it. Treat the sequence as something you are managing rather than something the platform is enforcing.
Closing the field set
When every field for every party is placed, close the field set. It is an explicit act, and it is worth doing: it fixes what the document is asking of whom, so a signatory who appears at the third sitting is signing the same document as the one who appeared at the first.
There is no seal button on the workspace
The workspace tells you whether the act is ready. It does not seal.
Sealing happens in the room, at the final sitting, with the last party present and the recording running. The workspace names the session where the act completes and takes you to it — it is a shortcut to your diary's own door, not a second way to finish an act.
This is deliberate. The recording is the evidence that the act was performed, and the seal is what you are attesting to; doing it on a dashboard an hour later would put the decisive moment of a notarial act outside every recording of it.
Identity evidence is yours alone
On the workspace, the documents are in two groups: the instrument, and identity evidence.
They are separated because they are different things that happen to be stored the same way. The identity evidence is what each party produced to verify themselves. It is held for as long as the act is live and then purged. It is not filed with the Chief Registrar, not attached to the certificate, and never shown to the client or to the other parties.
Calling somebody back
If a signature is missed — a field placed late, a party who appeared but did not complete — the person has to appear again. There is no way to collect a signature outside a session.
Where everybody was signing in one sitting and one person did not turn up, reconvening is yours to arrange. The opt-out on separate signing times does not bind you — that setting governs whether a client or a signatory may schedule an appearance of their own, and bringing everybody back is still one joint session.
The money is settled and will not change: the sitting already held is not refunded, and the person who missed it pays their own attendance fee for the replacement. Nobody is ever charged twice for somebody else's absence.
There is no one-click "bring them back" yet
The rule above is settled; the control that would let you schedule a further attendance from inside the act is specified and not yet built. Until it is, arrange the further sitting the way you would any other and tell the client what it will cost them — which is nothing, beyond what the person who missed it owes.
Your signature and seal
In the session you place three things, and there is nothing to configure while you are in there. Each is one click in the sidebar, then one click on the document where it should go.
| Stamp | What it places |
|---|---|
| Seal | Your registered digital seal |
| Signature | Your saved handwritten signature |
| Printed Name | Your name as commissioned, taken from your profile |
Set your signature up once, beforehand, in Digital Signature Setup. Set your seal up in Digital Seal Setup.
The seal does not appear until every signature is in
On an act with several signatories, the seal and signature controls stay out of reach until the last of them has signed. You are not being locked out of your own session — there is nothing yet to seal, and a notarial seal on a part-executed deed is the one mistake this platform is built to make impossible.
The workspace tells you who is outstanding and what each of them still owes.
Choosing how your printed name looks
Your name is fixed. How it is set is yours to choose.
Under Printed Name in the sidebar there is an Appearance panel showing your name in the face currently chosen. Open it and you get five faces and a size:
| Face | Reads as |
|---|---|
| Classic | A serif italic — legible, and the default |
| Script | A formal cursive |
| Flowing | A lighter cursive |
| Brush | A brush script |
| Hand | A felt-tip hand |
The preview is your own name, not a specimen, because the only question worth answering is what your name looks like in each — and a long name in a wide script is exactly the case that catches people out.
Classic is the default on purpose. Your printed name is the legible statement of who signed; your signature is the mark that is the signing. A cursive printed name makes the two look like the same thing.
Size runs from 24 to 52 pixels. The bounds are not arbitrary: below 24 a name stops surviving a photocopy, and above 52 a long name is shrunk back down to fit its field, so the control would appear to do nothing.
Choose once
Click Use this every session and the choice is saved to your profile. Every session after that opens with it already applied. Change it whenever you like — it takes effect immediately, and saving is you saying "and from now on".
If saving fails, the choice still applies to the session you are in. Only the "from now on" part is lost.
Nothing is typed
Your name comes from your profile on every stamp, so it cannot be misspelled and cannot be left blank. During testing a live document was stamped "Notry" — a typo in a box the notary should never have had to fill in, on an instrument that identifies them.
Placing a stamp
- Click Seal, Your Signature or Your Printed Name in the sidebar.
- Click the document where it should sit.
- Drag to reposition, or use the corner handle to resize.
Your own stamps are applied immediately — there is no pending state for them, and clients see them as applied.
If you have no signature saved, that card tells you so and points you to your profile. You can still complete the session with the seal and your printed name.
The seal is the commit point
Applying the seal is the notarial act. It is checked first — identity confirmed, every participant field signed, dates complete — and if anything is outstanding the seal is refused and nothing is placed on the document. You will see the reason and what to fix. A refusal never leaves a seal on the page.
Your notary seal
The seal always uses your registered digital seal PNG — the image generated from your Supreme Court Number (SCN) during Digital Seal Setup. You place it the same way as your signature and printed name: click Seal in the sidebar, then click the document where it should go. See Placing a stamp above.
Where you put it is your judgement. Wherever it goes, it must be visible on the finished document.
Recording must be live before you can seal
The platform refuses the seal unless the session is being recorded. Recording starts on its own when the session begins and you cannot turn it off, so in practice this only bites when the recording has actually dropped — in which case the recording status bar will already be telling you so.
The reason is not procedural. The seal is the commit point of the notarial act, and an act committed with no A/V recording is void: the Notaries Public Act 2023 requires audio and video throughout, and Reg 14(3) requires six years of A/V retention. The recording is the only artefact evidencing the act and the only one submissible under s.6(5).
If the seal is refused for this reason, click Restart recording in the status bar and try again — see If the recording stops unexpectedly. This safeguard can be lifted by a super-admin only, and only during a confirmed video-provider outage.
INFO
Your seal image is fetched automatically from your profile each time you join a session. If you have updated your seal (see Digital Seal Setup), the new version is used from the next session onwards.
Document finalisation
There is no separate finalisation step and no Finalise Document button. Finalisation is part of completing the session: when you click Complete Session, the platform tells you plainly that it "will finalise all signed documents, generate the notarial certificate, and send copies to all parties", and then does exactly that for every document at once.
What happens to each document at that point:
- The actual signature images are embedded into the final PDF.
- A TSA timestamp (RFC 3161) is embedded into the signature itself — a cryptographic proof, issued by an independent timestamping authority, of the exact date and time of signing. Because it covers the signature rather than sitting beside the file, any PDF reader can check it, and the signature stays verifiable after your signing certificate eventually expires.
- The document is locked and cannot be modified.
Certificates on a multi-session act
A certificate for an act conducted over several sittings names every one of them — when each was held, and who appeared at it. A certificate carrying three dates is correct, not a defect, and a reader of the deed is entitled to know that the signatures were collected on three separate occasions.
Two further things it carries:
The s.6(1) finding across all the parties. The jurisdiction clause is decided by where everybody was, not only by where you and the client were. A signatory appearing from outside Nigeria makes the audio-visual clause mandatory on the certificate even if every other party was in your own state. The workspace shows the finding and the declared locations it was derived from.
Whose execution each witness attested. Where a witness was recorded against a particular party, the certificate says so — a witness line reads "(witness for <name>)". On a deed with several signatories, "witnessed by" without a name attached does not say anything useful.
Certificate generation
When you click Complete Session, the platform automatically:
- Generates a notarial certificate PDF containing:
- Your name, Supreme Court Number (SCN), date called to the Bar, and commission number, date and state
- Client name and document details
- Session ID and jurisdiction classification
- West Africa Time (WAT) timestamp
- SHA-256 hash of the notarised document — the sealed PDF, not the original upload, so a relying party can hash the file they hold and compare. Where no hash was recorded the certificate says so explicitly.
- Your digital seal (embedded)
- A QR code linking to the public verification page
- Signs the certificate with the platform's RSA-PSS key.
- Stores the certificate in secure cloud storage.
- Emails the certificate to you, the client, and any witnesses.
Public certificate verification
Anyone can verify a certificate at any time — no account required:
- Scan the QR code on the certificate, or
- Visit www.notariseit.com/verify and enter the certificate ID.
The verification page confirms authenticity, the document hash, your SCN and name, the jurisdiction of the notarisation, and your current licence status.
That last one causes questions, so it is worth being able to answer them.
A change in your standing does not unmake a past act. The page shows whether you are commissioned and in good standing today, because someone relying on an instrument reasonably wants to know. If your commission has since lapsed or been suspended, the certificate still verifies — it was validly issued, and the page says so. A bank or registry reading it should see a genuine instrument and a current standing as two separate facts, which is how the page presents them.
"Hash unavailable" is not "no hash". If the document digest cannot be looked up at that moment, the page says the lookup was unavailable rather than showing a blank. A blank would read as an absence of evidence, which would be an accusation rather than an outage. Ask the person checking to try again shortly.
If a certificate genuinely does not verify, the page says so plainly and names what it could not find. That is the outcome to take seriously.
Evidence bundle
For sessions that may require formal submission (e.g. court filings):
- Go to Sessions → [Completed Session] → Download Evidence Bundle.
- The bundle is a ZIP containing the signed document, the notarial certificate, and the session audit trail.
Chief Registrar submissions
Under s.6(5) of the Notaries Public Act 2023, NotariseIt automatically emails a copy of the notarised documents and certificate to the Chief Registrar of the Supreme Court on your behalf when you complete a session.
You can view submission status, toggle opt-in, and manually trigger sends from Dashboard → CR Submissions in the sidebar.
See Chief Registrar Submissions for the full guide.