Home · Guides · updated 3 September 2026

WhatsApp Business and company accounts

A Business account changes very little about the export and a great deal about the certificate. The question stops being “whose phone is this” and becomes “who, in this organisation, can honestly depose to it”.

The export is the same

The Business application exports through the same menus and produces the same artefacts: a .txt transcript, or a .zip with the attachments, taken from the handset rather than from the web or desktop client. Nothing about the procedure in exporting a chat for court changes because the account is a business one.

Who was in lawful control

Part A is a declaration by a person, not by a company, and the Schedule asks for particulars of the device the record came from. So the deponent is whoever actually held that device and operated that account — and in an organisation that is a question of fact worth establishing before the certificate is drafted:

• A company handset issued to one employee is the easy case. That employee is the natural deponent, whether or not they are still employed.
• A shared counter phone operated by several people means the honest declaration describes shared operation, and the person deposing says how the device was used and by whom.
• The linked-device problem. Business accounts are frequently operated from a desktop or a second phone as well. The record still comes out of the handset the account is registered on, and the certificate should not imply that the handset was the only place the account was in use.
• A departed employee. Where the person who operated the account has left, the deponent is whoever took lawful control of the device and the account, deposing to that, rather than a director signing for a device they never touched.

Who signs Part A works through the general principle; the business case is the same principle applied to an organisation where lawful control is delegated and moves.

The ordinary-course-of-business conditions

Section 63(2) sets conditions on which a computer output is treated as a document: broadly, that the device was used regularly to create, store or process information for activities regularly carried on by the person having lawful control of it, that information of that kind was regularly fed into it in the ordinary course of those activities, that the device was operating properly over the material period, and that the output reproduces information so fed in.

Those conditions are often assumed to be about businesses. They are not confined to them — a personal handset used routinely for messaging satisfies them just as a shop counter phone does. What a business account adds is that the conditions are usually easy to depose to, because the regular use is the business itself.

What the Business app adds, and what it does not

• Order, cart and catalogue messages appear in the conversation and can carry the substance of the dealing — item, quantity, price — in a form the parties both saw.
• Automated greeting and away messages are sent by the application on a rule, not by a person. Identify them; a reply that was automatic should not read as an answer.
• Quick replies are a convenience for the operator and are indistinguishable from typed messages in the transcript.
• Labels are not in the export. The tags a business puts on a chat are local organisation, not part of the conversation, and an exhibit should not imply otherwise.
• The business profile — name, address, catalogue — is account information, not conversation, and is proved separately if it matters.

Where these conversations actually decide cases

In commercial matters the chat is frequently not corroboration of the contract but the place the contract was made: the quantity agreed, the rate, the delivery date, the variation nobody papered afterwards. Contract and commercial disputes deals with that at length, and cheque bounce proceedings with the dealing behind a dishonoured cheque.

Two problems specific to company accounts

Attribution inside the organisation. A message from a business account is a message from an account. Which employee sent it is a separate question, and where it matters the answer comes from evidence about who operated the phone at that hour, not from the display name.

Continuity. Handsets are replaced, numbers are ported, staff leave, and accounts get migrated. Each of those is a break the certificate has to describe truthfully. Where the record spans a change of device, the safe course is two exports and two certificates rather than one declaration that quietly covers both.

The counterparty deserves the same care. A customer is a person on a number, and identifying that person is the ordinary attribution problem — see attribution and third parties.

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This guide explains procedure and states the law as we understand it. It is not legal advice, and Aarohan Enterprises is not a law firm. Whether a court admits a particular record, and what weight it gives it, is for that court to decide. Have an advocate settle anything you intend to file.