Receipts, records, and what to keep

A drawer. The one in the kitchen, third one down. You opened it tonight looking for a battery and instead found three years of paper. A receipt for school shoes from 2024. An invoice from the dentist marked paid in pencil. A folded piece of card with a handwritten amount from your child's piano teacher. A wad of supermarket receipts you were meaning to file.

You stand there for a moment looking at the drawer.

You could spend the evening sorting it. You could close the drawer and walk away. You could throw all of it out and decide that whatever you needed from it is now gone.

Most parents pick the third option, eventually, by exhaustion rather than decision. This article is about a fourth option: setting up a record-keeping habit so the drawer never fills in the first place.

What this article is about

This article assumes the Pool from Article 01 is in place. The Pool's joint account or shared wallet creates its own record automatically. Most of what you used to keep on paper is now in the account's transaction history.

This article covers the residual question: what, beyond what the Pool keeps, do you actually need to keep yourself? And what habit makes the keeping painless?

The article is short. The principles are simple.

What the Pool keeps for you

The Pool's bank account or shared wallet automatically records every transaction with a date, an amount, and a vendor name. For most expenses, that's all you'll ever need. If you want to check what was spent on dentistry in 2025, you can filter the account history by the dentist's name. The answer is there.

This eliminates the need to physically file paper receipts for the routine flow of Pool spending. The transaction history is the record. You don't need a second one.

What the transaction history doesn't capture is detail beyond date-amount-vendor. If you need to know what specifically was bought at the supermarket on the second of March, the bank line just says supermarket, £47. The line item granularity is missing.

For most child expenses, line-item granularity isn't necessary. For a few categories, it is. That's where the keeping-stuff layer comes in.

What's worth keeping beyond the Pool record

Five categories of document are worth keeping in their own right.

Medical records. Receipts for medical or dental treatment that may need to be claimed through insurance. The receipts themselves usually have to be the originals, or scanned copies in the format the insurer requires. Both parents need access. The Pool's transaction history shows the spend; the medical receipt shows what the spend was for, which is what insurance needs.

School fee invoices and annual statements. These matter at tax time in places where school fees are tax-deductible. They also matter for any future application (scholarship, financial aid) that asks for proof of historical fees paid. Keep one year going back at minimum, more if your jurisdiction's rules are stricter.

Major one-off receipts (orthodontics, large medical, expensive equipment). Anything over a meaningful threshold. The threshold depends on your context; a useful rule is anything large enough that you'd want proof of payment if challenged in two years. Bicycles, instruments, laptops, major dental work, specialist consultations.

Activity invoices that include progress documentation. Music exam certificates. Sports grading records. School trip detail sheets. These have value beyond the financial record because they capture the child's progress. Keep them in a different folder from the money records.

Anything legal-adjacent. If your family has a court-set financial arrangement, or a mediated agreement, or anything that might be referenced in a future legal proceeding, keep the receipts that document compliance with that arrangement. This is the category most likely to surprise you in two years' time when something becomes relevant that you didn't think would.

Everything else can be discarded. Supermarket receipts. Petrol receipts. Café receipts. Small-purchase receipts. The Pool's transaction history has the date and amount. That's enough.

The habit that makes keeping painless

Here's the habit. It takes ten seconds per receipt, no more than five minutes per week.

When a receipt arrives, decide immediately: keep or discard.

Discard goes in the bin or the digital trash immediately. No drawer. No I'll sort this later.

Keep goes to one of two places. Paper goes in a single A4 folder, the same one every time, divided by year. Digital goes to a single folder in your cloud storage of choice, also organised by year. That's it. No tagging system. No spreadsheet. No app. Just the folder, sorted by date, searchable later if you ever need to look something up.

For Pool-paid items where you need the receipt for insurance or legal-adjacent reasons, take a photo of the paper receipt the day you receive it and upload to the cloud folder. The paper original goes in the A4 folder. You now have two copies in two formats, both findable.

For paper-only items that go through the discard pile, double-check that the Pool's transaction history captured the spend before throwing the paper away. Most of the time the Pool transaction is enough.

The five-minute weekly cadence: once a week, on whatever day suits you, you spend five minutes processing whatever has accumulated. Paper into the folder or the bin. Digital into the cloud folder or the trash. The drawer never fills.

What to share with your Co-Parent

Two principles.

Visibility, not surveillance. Both parents should be able to see what the Pool has spent at any time. This is what the joint account or shared wallet is for. Both parents should also be able to find any kept receipt if one of you needs it for an insurance claim, a tax filing, or a school query. Shared cloud folders work well for this. Either parent can access the year's records without having to ask the other.

What you don't want is a system where one of you is watching the other in real-time. Did they spend on the Pool today? Did they upload the receipt within twenty-four hours? That's surveillance, and it reintroduces the running-tally trap (Article 01). The Pool transaction history is appropriate visibility. Active monitoring isn't.

Annual reconciliation. Once a year, at the same time as the school-fee annual conversation (Article 02 sketched this), check that both of you have access to the year's records. Confirm the kept items are findable. Note anything that's missing. This is also when you do the annual purge: anything beyond the retention period for your jurisdiction can be discarded.

The annual reconciliation takes thirty minutes. It prevents the slow degradation where one of you has access to a year of records and the other doesn't.

Retention periods

Rule-of-thumb retention periods for the records that matter:

Medical receipts for insurance: seven years in most jurisdictions, sometimes less. Check your insurer.

Tax-relevant receipts (school fees, deductible expenses): the local tax authority's retention requirement, usually five to seven years.

Legal-adjacent records: keep indefinitely until any related proceedings are concluded; then a further period of seven years after conclusion.

Activity progress records (music certificates, sports grading): as long as the child finds them meaningful, often until they leave home. These aren't legal records; they're personal-history records.

Pool transaction history: the bank typically retains seven years automatically. You may want to download a yearly statement and keep it offline as a backup. Once a year, after the annual reconciliation, save the year's transactions as a PDF. Store it in the same yearly cloud folder.

Beyond the retention period, discard. Paper to recycling. Digital to permanent delete.

A small note on legal disclosure

If your family is currently in any kind of legal proceeding related to the separation or to financial arrangements, the rules above need adjustment. Your lawyer or mediator can tell you what to retain and for how long. In active proceedings, the general principle is keep more, longer. Outside active proceedings, the principles in this article hold.

If you've never had a legal proceeding and don't anticipate one, the article's defaults are fine.

The closing

A drawer. The one in the kitchen, third one down. You opened it tonight looking for a battery. The battery is there. So is a small stack of items waiting for the weekly five-minute processing on Sunday: a music exam certificate, an orthodontist invoice, a school trip receipt your child handed you yesterday.

Three items. Five minutes on Sunday. They'll be in the right folder before bedtime. The drawer will close.

You haven't thought about the receipt drawer in eighteen months. Most of what used to live in it doesn't exist anymore. The Pool's transaction history covers it. The kept items are findable in a folder that one of you set up in the cloud and both of you can reach.

You take the battery. You close the drawer. You go change the smoke alarm.

This is what record-keeping looks like when it isn't running your evenings.