Stop Tracking Retainage in Spreadsheets: Manage It Inside Business Central
How Retainage by Suite Engine Keeps Retention Money Visible From Purchase or Sales Order to Final Payment
You already know retainage ties up money you’ve earned. What’s harder to see is how much it’s currently costing you to track it: in a spreadsheet, updated by hand, checked against invoices someone has to dig up separately.
Retainage typically runs 5% to 10% of every progress payment, held back until the work is substantially complete (Levelset, 2025). On a $1 million contract, that’s up to $100,000 sitting outside your normal cash flow for months. Multiply that across every active job, and it’s easy to lose track of exactly what’s owed, to whom, and when it’s due to release.
The Cost of Slow Payment Is Bigger Than You Think
Retainage is only part of a larger payment problem in construction. Slow payments cost the U.S. construction industry an estimated $280 billion in 2024, equal to roughly 14% of total construction spending for the year (Rabbet, 2024). Construction also carries one of the slowest payment cycles of any major industry, with days sales outstanding commonly landing around 90 days (SMBcompass, 2026). Retainage sits inside that cycle as an additional, separate holdback. It doesn’t resolve until final completion, well after the rest of an invoice has been paid.
None of this is a reason to avoid retainage. It protects owners and gives everyone a reason to finish the punch list. But it does mean the money needs to be tracked as precisely as any other asset or liability on your books, not held loosely in a side spreadsheet that only one person understands.
Why Spreadsheets Fall Short
According to construction ERP provider CMiC, a large share of construction companies still rely on spreadsheets somewhere in their financial planning, and manually updated spreadsheets are prone to errors that are easy to miss until they show up in a reconciliation (CMiC, 2026). Retainage compounds that risk because it has to be tracked on two sides at once. Whoever is owed the money carries a retainage receivable, and whoever is holding it carries a retainage payable, and both figures need to match your actual contracts and pay applications.
When those numbers live in separate spreadsheets, on separate computers, updated at separate times, they drift. A missed row means an invoice that looks paid in full when it isn’t, or retention that should have released months ago and never did.
How Retainage by Suite Engine Works Within Business Central
Retainage by Suite Engine is built within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. It’s not a bolt-on tool that syncs data over from somewhere else. Retainage amounts are calculated and tracked using the contract, invoice, and payment data already living in your Business Central environment, so the numbers stay tied to the source documents instead of a separate file someone has to keep current.
Retainage by Suite Engine comes as two separate apps: one for payables and one for receivables. You can implement either one on its own, or both together, depending on which side of retainage your business needs to manage. Both apps integrate with Business Central, and both also integrate with HomeBuilder by Suite Engine for production builders who use it. Retainage is not bundled with HomeBuilder and works independently for any Business Central user who holds or receives retainage, whether you’re a general contractor, a specialty contractor, or a supplier managing retention on your own invoices.
Getting Started
If retainage is currently living in a spreadsheet next to your Business Central data instead of inside it, that’s the gap Retainage by Suite Engine is built to close. Setup is handled by Suite Engine’s implementation partners, who can help you configure the app around your existing contract and payment structure.
Ready to see how it fits your current setup? Schedule a demo, and we’ll walk through it together.
Related Articles
- Retainage Processing Purchasing Viewing Reporting Video
- Suite Engine Expands Retainage Receivables to Seven New Markets
- All-in-One Construction Management System
- Choosing and Implementing the Right Payment Solution
