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We definitely need this. I have numerous clients with numerous projects, who pay in monthly stages, sometime lasting years. Managing Xero and excel spreadsheets is so time consuming. I cant believe Xero has never progressed with this.

being able to keep track of retention is a critical part of accounting within our business and the fact that there is no plans in place to implement a solution is disheartening to say the least.
The solution posed by the admin team isn't a solution at all, when you need to include the retention portion in the invoice total, having it as a negative line item reduces the invoice total; you may as well not do anything.

It is incredible cumbersome having to use workarounds for our construction clients.

It will be great to have the feature showing on Invoices with CIS LABOUR AND RETENTION FOR CONSTRUCTION COMPANIES

Peter Miles, thank you, I am using your method and found that by entering the correct data in the description field of the retention line on the invoice, makes reporting so much easier. I use the Account Transaction report which I then filter based on the data entered on the invoice. You have to be consistent in this.
I would however want to see the ability to handle retentions more effectively. Xero was supposed to make accounting easier, but I still have to use too many excel sheets to keep track of when certain amounts are due.

My clients do use credit notes and a retentions receivable asset account or other similar workarounds. Unfortunately, this means creating a separate retentions receivable account for each of their customers and given that there's multiple projects and contracts for each of those customers and the retentions receivable can only be reconciled with the customer's statement on a per-project basis, it's still something that needs my clients to maintain a manual spreadsheet OR create a separate receivables account for each project (which gets very unwieldy very quickly).

Hi, we have the same problem as all companies within the construction sector that use Xero. Some projects can run for over 2 years or even longer and every month we suffer retention money on sales invoices which we record under the Retention Held account, but... the main problem is that Xero can't calculate the lump sum amount for retention held under the specific project (if we have more jobs from one main contractor-client) for the whole period which would be due 12 months after practical job completion only, so we need to calculate every invoice manually for every job separately. Also, it could flag/notify that retention is due soon. Plus it's not taxed correctly if the job is continued for a few years. It's a critical overseen by the Xero team.

The ability to record retention payments held back from construction works (UK) on invoices, this is a must feature for us to be able to record retention held back on invoices. I am pretty sure Quickbooks have this feature.

Come on Xero get with the times

Hi Anthea,
Yiu can do this by using a separate line on your invoices, a negative for the retention value, and code this to a customer retentions account in the Balance Sheet. You can run a transaction report to manage the values being carried forward. We also add a comment in the narrative, indicating the cumulative retention value, hope this helps.