Skip to content
Contact Us
  • There are no suggestions because the search field is empty.

Send Retention Statements to Your Subcontractors

This article is for finance and commercial users who manage subcontracts, and shows you how to download or email retention statements so your subcontractors always know how much of their money you’re holding.

Overview

Under the Construction Contracts Act, you need to keep your subcontractors up to date on the retention money you hold for them. Lentune now does the heavy lifting for you. The Retention Statements page brings together every subcontract you’re holding retention on, grouped by supplier, so you can see what’s been held, what’s been released and what’s still owing. From there you can download a statement for one supplier or email statements to a whole group in one go. Each supplier gets a single statement covering all of their subcontracts. Your payment schedules now also show a retention transaction history, so subcontractors see their retention position every time you respond to a claim.

Give Your Users Access

Retention statements have their own security role, so only the people who need them can see the page. Before anyone can use it, an administrator needs to give them the RETENTIONSTATEMENTS - Subcontract Retention Statements security role.

  1. Go to Administration > Security Roles.
  2. Double-click RETENTIONSTATEMENTS - Subcontract Retention Statements and open the Users tab.
  3. Select the users who need access and click Add user to security role.

If you manage access with security groups, you can add the role to the relevant group instead. See Granting Users Access to the Payment Claims Module for more on setting up access.

Set Where Your Retention Money Is Held

Every retention statement needs to tell your subcontractors where their retention money is held, such as a trust account, a complying instrument or a mix of both. You only need to set this wording up once.

  1. Go to Settings > Payment Claims Manager.
  2. Find the field for where retention money is held and type a description of your arrangement in your own words.
  3. Save your changes.

This wording applies across your whole organisation and appears on every retention statement you send. Keep it accurate, because it’s one of the details the Act requires your statements to include.

Find the Retentions You Want to Report On

Go to Payment Claims > Retention Statements. You can search by Supplier, Subcontract or Project. Click Advanced search to narrow things down further by Branch, End date, Retention balance or Statement status.

The End date is the date your statement runs up to, and it shows on the statement as the Statement Date. Pick today’s date for a current snapshot, or an earlier date, like the end of a quarter, to report on that point in time.

Your results are grouped by supplier. Each supplier row shows their total Retention held, Retention released and Retention balance across all their subcontracts, and you can expand it to see the figures for each subcontract and project underneath. The Statement status column shows when a statement was last sent to that supplier. All values are shown excluding GST.

Download a Retention Statement

If you want to check a statement before you send it, or send it yourself outside Lentune, you can download it for one supplier at a time.

  1. Find the supplier on the Retention Statements page.
  2. Click Download on that supplier’s row.

Lentune creates a PDF retention statement for that supplier, covering every subcontract they have with you up to your chosen end date.

Email Retention Statements to Your Subcontractors

When it’s time to send statements out, like at the end of a quarter, you can email a batch of suppliers in one go.

  1. Search for the suppliers you want to send statements to, and set the End date you want the statements to run up to.
  2. Tick the box at the end of each supplier’s row. To pick everyone in your search results, tick the box in the column header.
  3. Click Generate statements and email.

Lentune creates a statement for each supplier you selected and emails it to them. You can’t preview statements in this step, so if you want to check one first, download it before you send.

See Retention History on Your Payment Schedules

You don’t need to do anything to turn this on. If you’re holding any retention on a subcontract, its payment schedule automatically includes a Retention Transaction History section.

This section lists every claim transaction on that subcontract up to the end date of the claim you’re viewing, along with the retention held and released on each one. For example, if a subcontract has two claims and you open the payment schedule for the first claim, you’ll only see the history up to that first claim. The retention summary on the schedule follows the same date, so everything lines up.

This means your subcontractors get an up-to-date view of their retention every time you respond to a payment claim. Read more about approving subcontractor progress claims and releasing retentions on subcontracts.