Guide
Most title agencies still schedule notaries by hand: a closing coordinator works down a list of notaries they trust — phoning, texting, or emailing one at a time — until someone confirms they are free for the appointment window. A growing number of agencies have replaced that loop with scheduling software that shows every connected notary's real free/busy availability on a single board, so the coordinator can see who is actually open, filter to who covers the county, and send the signing to them directly.
Below: what the manual process looks like in practice, the specific ways it fails, and what changes when availability is visible before anyone picks up the phone.
A coordinator gets a signing with a date, time, and location, then starts contacting notaries who cover that area. Each contact is a round trip: send a message, wait for a reply, move on if the answer is no or slow in coming. It is common to reach three or four notaries before one confirms, and the loop can take anywhere from a few minutes to most of an afternoon for a short-notice signing or a county nobody covers well.
Because the coordinator is working blind. They cannot see whether a notary is free before reaching out, so every message is a guess. Replies arrive out of order, so two notaries sometimes accept the same appointment. And availability that was accurate an hour ago may not be now. The cost is not only the coordinator's time — it is the signings confirmed late, and the notaries who stop replying because most requests they receive are ones they cannot take.
The notary connects their existing calendar once, and the agency sees their free/busy on a shared board — when they are booked, never what they are doing. The coordinator filters to the counties that matter, sees who is genuinely open in the appointment window, and sends the request to one notary or to a filtered pool at once. The notary accepts or declines from their phone. The first to accept gets the signing, and the time is blocked on their calendar automatically, so nobody double-books.
No — free/busy only. NotaryBoard reads whether a block of time is open or taken and nothing else: no event titles, no locations, no attendees, no descriptions. That boundary is what makes notaries willing to connect a personal calendar in the first place.
No, and the distinction matters. A signing service supplies notaries — you hand over an order and they find someone to cover it. Scheduling software does not supply anyone: it organizes the notaries an agency already works with and trusts. Plenty of agencies use both — a board for their own roster, a signing service for overflow or unfamiliar territory.
NotaryBoard is priced per agency rather than per signing: Starter $39/month, Pro $129/month, and Agency $299/month, each starting with a 14-day free trial and no credit card. Notaries are never charged. Per-agency pricing is the norm here because the software is not taking a cut of the work — it is replacing coordination time.
By invitation. The agency invites a notary by email or shares a connect code. The notary links their calendar, sets the counties they cover, and starts receiving requests. There is no marketplace and no public directory — an agency's board contains only the notaries it invited.