Retention is the most predictable receivable in construction and the most commonly forgotten. Five or ten per cent is withheld on every certificate, half is due at practical completion and the balance at the end of the defects liability period.
None of that is disputed. It goes uncollected because nobody owns the register.
The register has to be generated, not maintained
A retention register kept by hand is out of date the moment an invoice is paid. It should be produced from the payment records themselves: every certified invoice contributes its retained amount automatically, and the register shows what has accrued per project, per client and per release milestone.
DLP is a calendar problem disguised as a legal one
A twelve-month defects liability period is easy to honour and easy to forget. The failure mode is not refusing to fix a defect; it is reaching month fourteen without having asked for the release. Every project should carry its DLP expiry on the same dashboard the commercial team already looks at, with the retention balance beside it.
What good looks like
At any moment you should be able to answer three questions in one screen: how much retention do we hold across all live and completed projects, which releases are due this quarter, and which DLPs expire in the next ninety days. If answering those takes a spreadsheet exercise, the money is at risk.
