Recording filings & correspondence

Some agencies accept requests by email, and PRA Center can send those for you once a person approves the letter. Others take filings only through their own portal, or on paper. For those, you do the filing yourself and then tell PRA Center what happened.

• Agencies you file with by email — approve the letter, PRA Center sends it, and “Mark as filed” records that it went out.
• Agencies you file with by portal or by mail — you file it yourself, then use “Record filing” to enter what you did.

Either path sets the request’s day one. That is what starts the statutory clock and what unlocks the logging tools below.

“Record filing” asks for the date the agency received the request rather than the date you sent it, because under IPRA the clock starts at delivery. You can add a confirmation or tracking number, and attach a filing receipt.

On a mail filing it also asks how it was sent — first class, certified, or certified with return receipt requested. The answer is required, because it is what the filing can prove: a return receipt carries the agency’s signature and date, while a first-class mailing rests on your own record alone.

Recording a filing is limited to workspace admins. How it was sent is written to the permanent audit record; what the request shows afterwards is the filed date and the tracking number.

If you chased an agency from your own mailbox, through a portal reply form, by phone, or in person, “Log outbound” puts that on the request’s timeline. Choose how you sent it, give the date you sent it, and paste or summarize what you sent.

This is for correspondence that has already left. PRA Center sends nothing when you log it — entries appear on the timeline marked “Logged — sent outside PRA Center”, so they read as your record of events and are never mistaken for a letter the platform sent.

Logging is available to admins, on requests that have already been filed, and you cannot log a date in the future. There is a matching “Log inbound” for a reply that reached you somewhere other than PRA Center.

The correspondence record only ever gains entries. A logged letter or reply cannot be edited or deleted afterwards — if you get something wrong, add an internal note explaining it rather than expecting to correct the entry.

This is deliberate: the timeline is meant to stand up as a record of what happened and when, including the parts that happened outside PRA Center.