How records and exports work

Everything in CoPa is built to hold up in court. Here is exactly how.

What goes on the record

Messages

Every message between co-parents is timestamped at the server when received, not when the sender taps send. Once submitted, a message cannot be edited or deleted by either parent, by CoPa staff, or by anyone else. The record is the record. This applies to messages sent through the app and messages arriving via SMS Relay.

Schedule changes

Every schedule change request (proposed, approved, denied, counter-proposed, expired) is logged with a server timestamp and the acting parent's identity. The audit trail is append-only. No entry can be modified or removed after the fact.

Expenses

Logged expenses include the amount, category, split ratio, receipt image, and any dispute or approval activity. The full expense history exports alongside messages and schedule data.

Bridge Notes

Structured handoff notes (sleep, mood, food, health, medication) are immutable after the transition day ends. They export as a per-child timeline that a pediatrician, teacher, or attorney can review chronologically.

Right of First Refusal offers

When a parent offers their custody time to the other parent under a ROFR clause, the offer, response, and deadline are all logged. The full notification trail is part of the record.

What is not on the record

Calm Reading rewrites.

Calm Reading is a receiver-side reading aid. The calm version of a message is cached briefly for performance and never stored as part of the permanent record. It is excluded from all exports. The legal record is always the sender's original, unaltered text.

Private journal entries.

Your private journal is never visible to your co-parent and never included in shared exports. You can export your own journal separately as a PDF if you choose to share it with your attorney or therapist.

Notifications and read receipts.

CoPa does not log when a message was read or whether a notification was opened. The record captures what was said and when, not whether the other parent looked at it.

How exports work

Pick a date range and category.

Select what you need: all messages from March through June, schedule changes for the last year, expenses in the medical category. Two taps to generate. The export includes everything in the selected range with no omissions.

What you get: a GPG-signed evidence package.

Every export is a single file containing the formatted PDF, the raw structured data, and a GPG cryptographic signature. The signature proves the records have not been altered since they left CoPa's servers. Your attorney, a mediator, or a judge can verify the signature independently without contacting CoPa or trusting a screenshot.

Why this matters.

Other co-parenting apps give you a PDF and call it court-ready. A PDF can be edited after generation. A screenshot can be doctored. CoPa's GPG signature makes tampering detectable. If someone modifies even one character of the export after it leaves our servers, the signature breaks. That is the difference between "we say it's authentic" and "you can verify it's authentic."

For attorneys: verifying a CoPa export.

Import CoPa's public key (published on our site and on public keyservers). Run the standard GPG verification command against the signed export file. If the signature is valid, the records are exactly what CoPa generated. No phone call, no subpoena to us, no trust required. The math does the work.

Immutability is not a feature. It is the architecture.

CoPa does not offer message editing, message deletion, or selective record removal because those capabilities would undermine the entire point. If either parent could alter the record after the fact, the record would be worthless. Both parents live under the same rules. Neither can edit. Neither can delete. That constraint is what makes the record trustworthy.

Questions about how CoPa handles records for your jurisdiction or practice?