Short answer. Usually not, and that is the key difference. For a private document, Article 172 of the Revised Penal Code requires damage to a third party or the intent to cause such damage. For a public, official or commercial document, no damage need be shown at all — the falsification alone completes the crime.
What the law says
Any person who, to the damage of a third party, or with the intent to cause such damage, shall in any private document commit any of the acts of falsification enumerated in the next preceding article
Revised Penal Code, Article 172 — Falsification By A Private Individual. Read the full provision →
Why the type of document decides the question
Article 172 has three numbered paragraphs and they are not interchangeable. The first covers a private individual who falsifies a public or official document, a letter of exchange or any other commercial document. Damage is not an element there, because the law treats the trust the public places in such documents as the thing harmed. The second paragraph is the one about private documents — an ordinary receipt, a private agreement, a ledger kept between two persons — and it applies only where the act was done to the damage of a third party or with the intent to cause damage. So the first thing to identify is not what was written, but what kind of document it was written on.
'Intent to cause damage' is not the same as harm
Saying nobody was harmed does not end the matter. The article is satisfied by damage or by the intent to cause it. A falsified private document that was prepared to be used, but was caught before it worked, can still fall within the paragraph. Damage also is not confined to money lost. It can lie in exposure to a claim, in the loss of a defence, or in being deprived of a right the genuine document would have secured. What the paragraph does exclude is the harmless alteration — a correction of one's own copy that was never meant to affect anyone else's position.
Using a false document is a separate act
The third paragraph reaches the person who did not forge anything but who knowingly introduced a false document in evidence in a judicial proceeding, or used it to the damage of another or with intent to cause damage. It carries the penalty next lower in degree. This matters to anyone who received a document from someone else and passed it on: knowledge is the element, and it is usually inferred from the circumstances of the use rather than admitted. The falsification itself must be one of the acts enumerated in the preceding article of the Code — the list of ways a document can be falsified is closed, not open-ended.
The penalty, and the RA 10951 figures
The penalty is prisión correccional in its medium and maximum periods and a fine of not more than one million pesos. That fine ceiling was set by Republic Act No. 10951 (2017), which revised fines and property values throughout the Revised Penal Code; pre-2017 reproductions still print the far smaller original amount and are simply out of date. In practice, falsification is often charged alongside estafa where a document was used to obtain money, and the two are analysed separately. Keep the original document rather than a photocopy, and take it to counsel before signing anything acknowledging or explaining it.