Post Office refuses to provide receipts for cash received; they expect me to use the receipt of postage document

If you intend to complain formally, you should use the correct terminology. As written it makes you sound like a crackpot (which I'm becoming decreasingly sure you are not).

There is no such thing as a "receipt of postage", I think you must be referring to a "certificate of posting". Your terminology is particularly confusing because "postage" is the fee they charge for conveying the item of mail, so in a sense "postage" *means* money and therefore a "receipt of postage", if it existed, would be precisely the document you require for your accounting records.

Your difficulty seems to arise from the fact that post offices now generally issue combined or dual-purpose documents which, in addition to being receipts for money, which is their main function, also happen to act as certificates of posting.

I can understand where you're coming from, that it's neater to have two documents (one for your accounting records and one for your correspondence file), I don't see why you can't just use the original receipt for your accounts, and make a copy of it for the correspondence file. You could even dispense with copying it, and instead just write a note on your carbon copy of the letter telling yourself where in your accounting files the original document may be found, should it ever be needed. If you keep accounting records in date order, even that may not be necessary.

Actually, the old-style Certificate-of-Posting cards are still available and are what would be used when you turn up with the appropriate postage stamps already affixed to the letter (so you wouldn't need to buy any). You fill in the card with the recipient's address and they date stamp it for you.

Perhaps your mistake was to ask for a separate receipt. You should have asked for a separate certificate of posting. :-)

It's not me that's going mad it's officialdom. The sooner the Conservatives get in and stop paying people to do nothing useful - whether at home/in classrooms/in hospitals/in police stations/or in offices - the better. What would they all do you say? Work hard to keep a job if they know it's the only thing that will keep them alive!

Filing accounting records in date order is madness.

It's a record that you have handed over a letter that is recorded delivery. It says "IT IS IMPORTANT THAT YOU RETAIN THIS RECEIPT AS IT IS YOUR PROOF OF POSTING". It didn't say that it's proof that you paid for it!

Of course I could photocopy the single document I have got. I could arrange that with everybody I know and swap them around and reduce our tax bills! I prefer the originals.

I'll check whether you can buy stamps for the full cost of recorded delivery service.

I've just had one of those nice cards the Post Office puts through the door saying you are not at home. They must know something I don't know. I've been home all day.

I've talked to the manager of the Post Office. It appears it's my wife's fault. She should have demanded to see a supervisor and they would have instructed the counter "assistant" to print a receipt. I suggested he should train and manage his staff better.

It is more usual to keep them in the order of transaction numbers allocated sequentially by your bookkeeping system when you make the entries. Typically though, you would make the entries in such an order that the order of numbers will be roughly in date order.

In any case it should be simple to search through your system and look up all transactions in the "postage expenses" category, to find a selection with dates in the vicinity of that of your letter. Typically there will be so few that you can then go to the lever arch file armed with those numbers to find your proof of posting filed under one of them.

Yes, that's exactly what it says, it says the same for unrecorded parcels.

Yes of course it does, it contains the words "THIS RECEIPT", and "receipt"

*means* that it is an acknowledgement that they have received the money which is detailed further up the document.

If you want to be pedantic, the word "receipt" means they acknowledge having received *something*, not necessarily money, and I believe you are interpreting this to mean it acknowledges having received the letter. I believe this is a misinterpretation, and that the word "receipt" should be taken to have the usual common meaning of proof of receipt of payment, and the words "this receipt ... is your proof of posting" are to be taken to mean "this proof of payment is also your proof of posting".

As it happens, the document also rather helpfully states at the bottom "This is not a VAT receipt". But (as with petrol station receipts) that doesn't mean it's not "a receipt", just that it's a receipt which is unsuitable for VAT accounting.

The question arises whether the recorded delivery surcharge (above the ordinary postage fee) is VATable (AIUI ordinary postage is not). If so, and perhaps even if not, you could try asking them for a VAT receipt, pointing out to them that it says this isn't one. :-)

In the modern world documents are more usually filed in alphabetical order of supplier. This is more efficient for most queries.

Much more work than having a receipt for payment and a receipt for the letter.

Thanks for confirming what it says.

I want to be pedantic - or, more realistically, correct.

Wow, I have spent the last 37 years wondering what that meant! (not really)

The recorded delivery sucharge is classed as a "related service" and is also exempt from VAT.

It may be efficient for random queries, but I'd think such queries are so rare that there is little to be gained by striving for this particular flavour of efficiency, particularly in the "modern world" where there is likely to be a computerised system which can be searched on supplier name, date, invoice numbers, etc, and which can then give you the document sequence number under which to find the paper document.

The reason I think it more important to sort by transaction number is that in an audit every document will need to be viewed, and it's surely more efficient to go through the document file in the same order as the transactions appear in the accounts.

That's not at all clear. Getting and filing two copies of some documents in two places is also work which adds up. Most of the time this double work is unnecessary: Out of all the recorded delivery letters you have ever sent, how often have you had to dig out the proof of posting in order to produce it? Not very, I'd say. And then it would not have taken not very long to find it in the accounts file, almost certainly much less than what you get if you add up all the time wasted filing extra copies which never need to be consulted.

But to claim this document is not a proof of payment would be incorrect.

I think you've been influenced by the current trend to not deal with a problem quickly because it's too much effort. If somebody phones me with a question I deal with it in a few seconds. When I deal with any organisation it takes them weeks to come up with an answer and it's still wrong.

Most of my dealings are with Companies House and HMRC so over 50% of the time I have to refer to the proofs of posting. These organisations are in a chaotic state due to the desire to keep their snouts in the trough rather than have a clue what they are supposed to be doing.

Your statement seems to be made without any analysis of the time spent putting two documents in two different places as opposed to putting one document is one place and then going from one file and finding the relevant document in another file.

So if you bought stamps separately (and obtained a receipt for payment of those stamps at that time) and then handed the stamps over would this document showing the receipt of the letter for the £1.14 priced service show a different price for the service? I think not. Then you would actually have two receipts (you say of payment) which totally more than £1.14 - one for the stamps and one for the proof of delivery service.

Fair enough. I concede that if the expected referral rate is much higher than insignificant, then the only sensible thing is to duplicate the document so that you have one copy in the letter file and one in the receipts file.

I merely felt that if the referral rate were low, the time saved by not duplicating them (accumulated over a largish number of occurrences) might exceed the extra time spent finding them when needed.

No it wasn't, I did think it through properly. You have one document and put it in the file where all the receipts are kept for accounting purposes, having made the entry for that transaction in the computer. Of course you write the computer system transaction number on each filed receipt, and keep them in that order in the file.

Having found the letter in the letter file, you know the date. You look up on the computer what postage receipts there are near that date. This takes only a few seconds to give you the transaction number (or a small selection of them) under which the receipt may be found in the receipts file. This is a little contorted, but not much for a task only needed a couple of times a year.

If you need to do it more often, say a couple of times a month, there is still a time saving possible if it takes longer to duplicate the document and attach one copy to your copy of the letter than simply to write the transaction number on the copy letter. Then when you need to find the document you can bypass the computer lookup and go straight to the right place in the receipts file.

Indeed you would, but this last paragraph of yours does not address what I wrote immediately above it, so I don't know what point you're trying to make. Clearly the proof of payment for the £1.14 service would still be part of a dual-purpose document acting also as proof of posting, which you would still need to duplicate yourself, so there is no advantage to paying the bare postage element separately.

Ideally you'd want to pay for the whole thing (including the £1.14 service) with pre-bought stamps. I don't know if this is possible but I see no reason in principle why it shouldn't be. You would then be given a proof of posting (which you misleadingly refer to as "receipt of the letter") which shows no amount, because it would not be a receipt, it would just be a proof of posting.

Even better - get the Post Office to do the sensible thing.

There's been stories about Postmasters (?) being accused of diverting money with counter accusations of the required software getting the numbers wrong. I wonder whether my problem is related?

I don't keep my accounts in that detail. What I do is keep a drawer for every month's documents. At the end of the month I make piles by types of expenditure. Some larger invoices I enter on a spreadsheet separately and but smaller receipts (proof of payment, if you prefer) are grouped by type of expenditure and whether VAT is charged. I may have 20 receipts for postage so I total them up, enter the month, type of expenditure and total on a petty cash voucher and staple them together. I then enter the details as one line on my spreadsheet.

As you can see, going from one file to another and finding documents is much more effort than simply putting one receipt in an accounts file and pinning one to the letter.

I'll see what I can do about stamps. The problem is getting the right collection of stamps given the regular price increases.

Things were going quite well in the thread until that.

I think I will call it a day.

Thanks for your contribution.

Am I alone in asking this? Please do not think this cheeky, but do you read, and write to the letters page of, the Daily Telegraph?

No

What day are you going to call it?

[...]

Excuse me but, er.. Titanic, deckchairs...?

Not at all. I don't want a Government telling people what to do. If they simply stop wasting money it would be all the improvement we need.