Retention is the easiest money in the business to forget about and the most annoying to chase eleven months later. Set the rate once and let the system hold it.
Ask who owns the retention schedule in a 25-person mechanical services business and the answer is usually a name, not a system. One person knows which jobs have money held, at what rate, and roughly when it should come back. That knowledge is real, and it is also a single point of failure.
Retention is unusual among the numbers in a project: it is money you have earned, invoiced, and not received, on a timetable measured in months rather than weeks. Almost nothing else in the business works on that clock, which is exactly why it slips.
Why the spreadsheet fails slowly
A retention spreadsheet does not fail with an error. It fails quietly, one row at a time. A claim gets made without the withholding applied. A defects period ends and nobody notices. A practical completion date moves and the release date underneath it does not.
By the time anyone reviews it, the amounts are small enough individually to feel not worth chasing and large enough collectively to matter. Across a year of projects in a 10–30 person business, unclaimed release amounts are routinely the largest pool of forgotten money on the balance sheet.
Set the rate once
In TSMPlus, retention is a property of the project. Set the rate — 10% on the sample project — and the system withholds and tracks it against every claim from there. You are not remembering to apply it; you are not applying it manually and hoping the arithmetic held.
Release milestones are handled the same way. First and Final Release each carry their own due date and status, so a release that is coming due appears on the project rather than in a diary reminder. Nothing has to slip months down the track before someone notices.
The rest of the picture, on one screen
Retention is the last piece of a wider point that runs through this whole series: the reason retention, claims, costs and variations can all be trusted is that they are the same underlying data.
On a TSMPlus project the Dashboard, Cost Centres, Invoicing and Financial tabs show the same figures because there is only one set. Contract value, what has been claimed, what remains, retention held, margin by cost centre — all readable in one place, by anyone in the office, without a reconciliation step.
Five weeks in one line
The structure should fit the work, not the other way around. Nest the stages as deep as the job goes, roll the costs up live, keep variations in the plan, claim against what is actually complete, and let the system hold the retention.
Bring your most complicated job — a multi-site retrofit, a staged upgrade, whatever is currently held together by a spreadsheet — and we will show you the tree.
Retention on a spreadsheet works right up until the person who built the spreadsheet moves on.
See it on your own job.
Bring us your most complicated project and we’ll show you what it looks like in TSMPlus Projects.
