Good morning, just a quick warning to you not to do what I did with my Royal Mail click and drop account.
I normally keep my bookkeeping up-to-date on a monthly basis but for a good few months in 2024 I didn’t print out my Royal mail click and drop monthly statements.
I went to retrieve them a few days ago for my 2024 to 2025 accounts and after about 13 months they are no longer retrievable.
I contacted Royal Mail to see if they could get them for me from any archives, but they do not hold this information for longer than 13 months because of GDPR.
This wasn’t that bad because I knew that I could print out my PayPal statements and retrieve all the information from there even though it would be a long winded process adding up each transaction rather than having it all on a monthly statement.
When I went to print out my PayPal statements, there was a problem and it wouldn’t let me go back beyond a year even though you can normally collect seven years worth of statements on PayPal.
I had to contact PayPal and they had to manually create the statements for me because they said it was a glitch on some people’s accounts at the moment.
So what should have only taken me 10 minutes to print out from Royal Mail ended up taking me a whole day to sort out.
I won’t be making that mistake again. I will definitely be printing my click and drop statements at the end of each month religiously!
1 Like
That is rubbish! 
I well remember the frustrations of PayPal at tax return time but haven’t had to put up with it for years now as I bought an Excel template to do all of that shennanigans for me! It also makes quick and easy work of the payment account stuff from my shop on the other side. If you’re interested, you can get one here: https://www.madeonthecommon.com/ although the PayPal add on is a custom request but very reasonaly priced and Sarah there is super helpful. This add on pulls all of my Click and Drop stuff over from the PayPal reports and all sales info. The only thing I have to manually add are expense items - I wish that could be included as well and then it’d be perfect!
1 Like
That’s very interesting Debbie.
I will have to get out out of the dark ages soon anyway when I have to do my tax digitally.
1 Like
Yes, not sure how that’ll work when the roll out gets to us. At the moment they seem to be saying that you’ll be forced to buy software to do it, which will cost hundreds.
1 Like
Funnily enough, I looked it up the other day as well. I wanted to know if HMRC would provide the software but like you said it looks like they won’t and we’ll have to find our own at a cost. At that point, I’m wondering whether it would just be as cost-effective to hire an accountant.
1 Like
This was me at the weekend! Checking over accounts before submitting 2024/2025 tax return and realised I didn’t have Royal Mail paperwork for May, June and July of 2024. Went to click and drop to get them and like you found out they only.hold 13 months.
Had to go back through Paypal and bank account statements to make sure I’d accounted for all the postage payments. Took so much longer than I needed it to take.
Realised I’d forgot to print them for those months as husband was in hospital and then recovering at home during that time so I must have been meaning to catch up at a later date but then didn’t until now.
January last year - 2025 I started downloading all statements etc to folders in my one drive so I don’t have to print it all out, so much easier as all now in month folders with the busy months broken down into weekly within the months. Can download Folksy order receipts for each order too making it super easy to check orders against folksy monthly fees, stripe/paypal fees and postage costs all in the same folder.
Saves time as well as paper and ink.
Lou x
1 Like
Yes, I’ve been downloading statements, receipts etc for a while now too - so much easier than storing paperwork in the loft. You can’t do it with everything, but I’d say it’s reduced it by 90%! Wish I’d thought of it years ago…
2 Likes
I was chatting about it with my dentist this morning and he’s thinking of firing his accountant and saving £1,500 a year! It’ll be interesting to see what the cost of the HMRC software will be as it rolls down to the micro businesses.
1 Like
