Retention calculator
What a retention leaves you, what is actually owed today, and when the rest falls due. Free, nothing to sign up for.
- Held back
- £1,000.00
- Owed to you now
- £19,000.00
- Owed eventually
- £20,000.00
£1,000.00 is held, not late. No release date is set, so it is not overdue and never will be until one is — a retention nobody has dated is not a debt you can chase. Chasing it today is a phone call to your biggest customer about money their own contract says is not due.
Held retention is not a late payment
An invoice paid short by retention looks exactly like an invoice paid short by a customer who has not finished paying. Without somewhere to record it, the balance reads as overdue, the debtor ageing counts it, and the chase list hounds a contractor’s biggest customer for money their own contract says is not due.
That is why the figures above are split into owed now and owed eventually. Only the first is a debt.
A retention with no date is never late
If nobody has set a release date, the money is held indefinitely and no amount of time makes it overdue. The answer is not to chase it anyway — it is to get the date agreed in writing, because a retention nobody dated is the one that quietly becomes permanent.
Tell the customer it is retention, not a late invoice
Past its release date, retention is ordinary money owed — but “your invoice is overdue” is the wrong phone call to make about money a quantity surveyor is deliberately sitting on. Name it, give the release date, and it is a different conversation.
Showing it on the customer’s copy helps too: an invoice £1,000 short of its total with nothing explaining why is an invoice somebody rings about.
A note on what this is
A guide, not advice, and it cannot know everything about your arrangement. Check anything that matters with your accountant.
Built by TaskMyJob, which does this on every invoice it raises. More free reading: recording retention on an invoiceCIS on a subcontractor invoiceall the guides.