With many thousands of sticks needing to be stored, written records must have supported the tally stick practice. (Even with writing, tally sticks may have been a concession to general illiteracy and uncommonness of writing instruments.) Perhaps the stored sticks (counterfoils) had an additional marking (as simple as a number, or perhaps a name and location) or an attached leather tag, either way identifying the foil owner with all of that tracible by way of some master written record. I’m just guessing here because, sure, just having a bunch of sticks won’t do it alone. 
Clerks with good visual memory?
I once had a colleague (old school EE) whose filing system was… well…
You could just open the door to his office. From then on you had to watch your step.There was a mound of files (usually loose leaves in a manilla folder) rising in a gentle slope from the floor to the presumed location of the desk, forming some sort of wave breaking against the far wall.
Whenever I had to borrow a file from him it never took him longer than 90 seconds to locate it. Never managed to find anything when he wasn’t there.
My theory is that his brain used a combination of “presumed colour of folder”, “presumed spatial coordinates of folder” and “presumed date of filing”.
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They were sticks.
You can use sticks to hit people on the head or poke in the eye to settle any arguments.
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I guess you wrote ‘burn’ intending us to understand its modern meaning ‘make’, because if you burn a copy of a tally stick, you’d have no copy.
It took me a few seconds to realise that was what you meant. It made no sense, otherwise. 
But if both halves are produced and they differ (because someone added some notches after they were split) then the one who claims the higher amount must be in the wrong as it is hard to remove a notch from a stick.
Taxes. Slightly better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
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BUT YOU WOULDN’T PRESENT THE REAL STICK IF YOU WERE LYING
AGH
Fraudsters are stupid. Some no doubt dumb enough to think they could alter notches and claim theirs was the ‘real’ one.
And I did say if both halves were produced. The fraudster may not present their real stick, or claim to have lost it, but someone else might produce it.
Your insistence that their only use was as a convenient carbon copy seems very determined. You concede that they enable agreement to be proven. Hence they also enable a dispute to be logged, and just like with an alleged paper carbon copy, a court can decide on the balance of probability, given the evidence or lack of it (“I ‘lost’ my stick, honestly I did, judge”) who may be telling the truth and which copy (if both are present) may be the genuine one, based on both the carbon copy and on other factors in the dispute. And justice back then may well have been as crude as “well there’s only one stick so we believe that one, tough shit on the bloke who claims to have lost his and that this half is a forgery, he should have been more careful”.
Tally sticks existed. They were very widely used. There was more than one ‘use case’. Go figure.
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At my first employer, there was a parts clerk, Louise, who serviced the entire manufacturing floor and the research/test side of the house. This was a few years before a computerized sorting/retrieval system was finally installed. Based on the quantity of company parts binders I had access to and the number of pages in each, I’d say there were several thousand part numbers stored away in Louise’s sprawling multi-tiered parts crib. No matter what p/n our own 100+ department employees (forget about the manufacturing side) hit her with, she’d always grab the right one. The crib was a big airy thing, so we could see her making bee-lines straight to what we needed; no indecisiveness. On the very few days she was unavailable (she was a workaholic), we’d have to go into the crib with her back-up (in-name-only) for the big search. Why? The crib had grown and evolved over the years to the point where items were not stored in numerical order (!!) and — since everyone was super- happy with Louise — the company saw no great need to upgrade the crib. At that time she was in her 70s and refused to retire. As such, she represented a single-point failure, so when illness finally stopped her, the company finally had to kick in for the upgrade. (I’m getting a Ruth Bader Ginsberg vibe here.)
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