Release contract retention and invoice it

Every approved bill-of-quantities claim on a contract carries the retention held cumulatively to date, split into a main-contract share and a variation-orders share. Because each claim restates the running total rather than adding to it, the amount currently held is the highest figure across the approved claims — not their sum. A contract whose three claims recorded 0, 200 and 460 is holding 460, and the system reads it that way.

From there the arithmetic is simple, and it is kept separately for the two halves of the project:

A variation order does not hold retention of its own — claims live on the main contract. Its share of the project's variation retention is its share of the certified progress recorded against it, and the same proportions are used again when the release is split into invoices. The contract's BOQ Inv Options tab shows the whole summary: held, released and balance for the main contract, for the variations, and for the two together.

The button is not a state change with paperwork to follow. In one press it:

• checks the record is still in Draft, that the total is above zero, and that neither amount exceeds its available balance;
• creates a customer invoice for the main-contract amount, dated the release date, referencing the contract, with a single line named Main Contract - Retention Release - RET-REL-000nn;
• splits the variation amount across the variation orders in proportion to the progress certified on each — the last one absorbing the rounding — and creates one invoice per variation, named the same way;
• posts every one of those invoices immediately, with no draft stage to review;
• moves the record to Released, links the invoices to it, and posts the three amounts to the chatter.

The invoice line uses a retention-release product when one has been configured in the bill-of-quantities settings; otherwise it is a plain text line posted to the sales journal's default account. Either way the amount is exactly what you typed.

The list shows Reference, Main Sales Order, Customer, Release Date, Release Type, the two amounts and the total — each of the three amount columns summed at the foot — and a Status badge, with draft rows in blue, released in green and cancelled greyed out.

The menu asks for the list to arrive filtered to drafts, but the screen's search view defines no such filter, so the request is silently ignored and you get every record, in every state. Two consequences: there is no chip in the search bar to tell you a filter is on, and the column sums include drafts and cancelled records. Never read the Grand Total as money released. The search panel here is bare — it offers only Reference and Main Sales Order to search on, with no ready-made filters or groupings — so to separate the states you have to add Status yourself as a custom group.

The header buttons appear in strict alternation, and between them they make a released record terminal. Cancel is offered only while the record is Draft; it simply marks it Cancelled, and because nothing has been created yet nothing else happens. Reset to Draft is offered only on a Cancelled record, and only to the BOQ Invoice Administrator group.

A record in Released therefore shows no buttons at all. There is no undo, no reversal and no way back to draft from the interface. If a release was wrong, the remedy is entirely in Accounting: raise credit notes against the invoices it posted. Do that and the ledger is right, but be aware of the consequence — the release record stays Released, so the contract still counts those amounts as released and offers a smaller balance than it should. Someone has to reconcile the two by hand.

Cancelling a draft, by contrast, costs nothing: a draft's amounts were never counted as released in the first place.