Sage Construction Management Ideas Portal
Most contracts in New Zealand and Australia that have retention held are not a flat percentage being held across the contract.
The common rules are
NZ 10% up to $200,000 then 5% next $800,000 and 1.75% next $8,000,000 then nothing after that
AUS 10% held per Invoice up to 5% Contract Value and with this commonly its only on Original Contract items not Variations (Change Orders)
Same rule would be need for Prime and Sub Contracts
merge these two tickets relating to sliding retainage
https://sageconstructionmanagement.ideas.aha.io/ideas/SAGECM-I-68
https://sageconstructionmanagement.ideas.aha.io/ideas/SAGECM-I-81
Per request I have added a couple of screenshots of the excel calculator we use to get the current invoice retention percentage we need to enter manually. Would be great if the system could calculate itself like other systems we work with.
What we see in other systems is you can set up a flat % so everything is just the same per how SageCM works currently. Or you can set sliding scale where you can add as many applicable tiers as required at their required percentage
NZ tends to have this style with what is essentially 4 tiers. Up to 200k 10% then to 1M 5% then to 9M 1.75% then 0% after that so it caps out at maximum $$200k retention
AUS tends to be only 2 tiers. Up to half contract value 10% then after that 0% so by time project is fully invoiced it is back to 5% contract value held. AUS also tends to only hold retentions on original contract items only not variations. So most systems that have it when you do a variation (change order) you can flag if retentions are held against it when invoiced. So typically for AUS this is unchecked but for NZ it is checked. Usually a default setting but can be manually controlled per variation
The above are just the common rules for how it works but contracts can have different rules. So while retention rules could be copied from system setting we would still need to change when required per contract. Most often we see system defaults that apply but can be edited to suit.
And again would need the same features for Prime and Sub Contracts