Procurement & finance
Retention Ledger
The record of retention held against every contract, with the amounts and the dates on which each half becomes releasable. Its absence is why retention so often ages quietly into a bad debt.
Retention is rarely lost to a dispute. It is lost to inattention: the defects liability period expires, nobody applies for release, the employer does not volunteer it, and the sum sits on the balance sheet until somebody writes it off.
A ledger with release dates against every contract is the entire remedy, and it is unglamorous enough that most contractors do not keep one — which is precisely why the money is still sitting there.