What is a correspondence register, and how should project letters be numbered?

Letters carry positions. Email carries coordination.

In GCC consultant culture this distinction is well understood and rigorously kept: a position is taken by numbered letter, and everything else happens by email. That is not ceremony. It is what makes a position findable, attributable and dated three years later, which is the only test that ever matters.

Email is excellent for coordination and hopeless for positions, because it has no sequence, no register, and no way to distinguish the important message from the four hundred around it.

What the register holds

Number, date, direction, from, to, subject, the records the letter references — and an action-by date, which is the field most registers omit and the one that makes the register a control rather than an archive.

• The number is how other letters refer to this one. “Our letter of the 14th” is a phrase; “CON-LTR-0412” is a document.
• The references are how a position connects to the RFI, instruction or claim it rests on.
• The action-by date is how an incoming letter with a response window stops being an email somebody intends to deal with.

Numbering rules that survive contact with a project

Sequential, per correspondence stream. Published at mobilisation. And never renumbered mid-project — because the moment you renumber, every reference in every earlier letter points at the wrong document, and you have created a problem that will outlive the project.

A gap in the sequence is a signal worth having, too: it means a letter exists that is not in the register, and finding it now is cheaper than having the other side find it later.

Terms

• Correspondence Register