The tray on the reception desk
Every morning the post arrives and a chunk of it is brown envelopes from HMRC. Statements of account, notices to file, penalty notices, coding notices, the occasional enquiry letter. Reception opens them and puts them in a tray. On a good week, someone sorts the tray every day. On a bad week, in January or around a staff absence, it sits.
Clients also forward their own HMRC letters by email, photo or WhatsApp, usually with "is this something I need to worry about?" attached. Those go to whoever the client knows best, who may not be the person handling their tax.
Sorting post is nobody's real job
HMRC correspondence arrives through several routes: letters to the practice as agent, letters to clients that clients forward, and messages in online services. There is no single inbox, and each letter has to be read to work out which client it is for and whether it matters.
The reading is the bottleneck. A letter's type and urgency are obvious to an experienced person in seconds, but the person opening the post is often not that person. So everything waits for someone senior to look, and senior people are the busiest in the practice.
There is also no record. Once a letter is handed to a manager, the practice has no easy way of seeing which letters are still waiting for action.
What a slow post tray costs
| Delay | Effect |
|---|---|
| Penalty notice unread | Appeal window shortened before anyone looks |
| Statement not reconciled | Client told the wrong balance |
| Client forward to the wrong person | Letter handled late or not at all |
| No log of letters | No way to see what is outstanding |
| Senior time sorting | Managers doing admin instead of client work |
How we turn post into allocated work
- Paper post is scanned at reception on a document scanner, and client forwards go to a dedicated post address or upload link, so every item enters one queue.
- Each item is read with OCR and a language model to pull out the taxpayer reference, the client name, the tax and the type of letter, such as statement, notice to file, penalty or enquiry.
- References are matched to clients in your practice management system, and anything that cannot be matched with confidence goes to a person.
- The letter is filed on the client record and added to the responsible manager's task list, with types your practice marks as time-sensitive flagged at the top.
- Dates in the letter are extracted for the manager to confirm before any deadline is diarised.
- A practice-wide view shows every letter received this week and which are still open, so nothing sits in a tray unseen.
The system reads and routes. Deciding what a letter means for the client, and what to do about it, is for your team.
Post dealt with the day it arrives
The tray empties every morning. Letters reach the manager who handles that client, already filed on the right record. Penalty notices and enquiries stand out from routine statements. Clients who forward letters get an acknowledgement and the right person picks it up. And partners can see at a glance whether anything is waiting.
In January, when the post is heaviest and the team is busiest, this is the difference between a manageable pile and a problem.
Is your post tray like this?
- HMRC letters wait days to be sorted
- Clients forward letters to whoever they know
- Nobody can list which letters are still open
- Managers spend time working out whose letter it is
- A penalty notice has been found late