Last updated: July 28, 2026
Information, not legal advice. Chit provides document tooling and general information about small-claims and civil-debt processes in the places it supports — currently Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom (England and Wales) and Taiwan. It is not a law firm, and nothing in the app is legal advice. For advice about your situation, consult a licensed lawyer or paralegal.
A sealed record is tamper-evident and independently verifiable: anyone can re-compute the hashes without trusting us, and any later change to the text, amounts, dates or parties breaks them. Whether a court admits it, and what weight it gives it, is always for the court to decide — no one else can promise that.
It proves the agreement, not the payment. The record proves that both people agreed to these terms. It does not prove the money actually changed hands. Keep the transfer record too — the e-transfer confirmation, the bank statement line, the receipt. In Taiwan this is not a nicety: a 消費借貸 is formed by handing the money over (民法 §474), so the transfer proof is part of the claim itself. Elsewhere "it was a gift, not a loan" is the standard defence (Pecore v Pecore, 2007 SCC 17).
A signature here is anchored to possession of a mobile number at one moment. A one-time code sent to that number, and returned within minutes, shows the number was in the signer's hands when they signed. That is a test of possession, not proof of who the person was — unless identity verification was carried out and recorded, in which case the record says so.
Whether a statutory presumption of integrity is available depends on where you are. Canada's federal Canada Evidence Act s.31.2(1)(b) presumption is a dead letter — no regulation has ever been made under s.31.4(b) — and Quebec's Court of Appeal held in Benisty c. Kloda, 2018 QCCA 608 ¶100 that art. 7 creates no presumption of integrity either. Ontario is not the same: Evidence Act s.34.1(7) is headed "Presumption of integrity" and provides that, absent evidence to the contrary, the integrity of the electronic records system "is proved" — including where the system is shown to have been operating properly. Whether that is made out on any particular record is for the court to decide. Separately, several provinces let integrity be proved by evidence of the technique used: Ontario s.34.1(5.1) and Alberta Evidence Act s.41.4(2) both allow it to be proved "by evidence that reliable encryption techniques were used". British Columbia has no equivalent general provision at all.
Limitation periods are real: in Ontario you generally have two years from default to sue. In England and Wales the period for a simple contract debt is generally six years (Limitation Act 1980 s.5). In Taiwan the general period is 15 years (民法 §125), but interest and other periodic payments run out in five (民法 §126). Deadlines vary by province, state and circumstance — verify yours.
Part payment restarts the clock; an acknowledgment after it expires does not revive it. In Ontario, a partial repayment has the same effect as a signed acknowledgment and restarts the two-year period, with no writing or signature required (Limitations Act, 2002 s.13(11)) — so every payment you record here is doing real work. But s.13(9) is a hard wall: an acknowledgment made after the period has already run out cannot bring the claim back to life. Don't wait for one. The rule that part payment restarts time is not universal — verify it for your own jurisdiction before relying on it.
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