Money earned in month two comes back in month eighteen
Retention from framing you did two winters ago is still out there because that job hasn't closed. Carpentry starts early and ends on the last day, so both ends wait on one closeout.
Most trades touch a job once and leave, so their retention ages from one window on the schedule. Yours ages from two windows, and the older half is the half you spent the most payroll on, because framing is labor heavy and it happened before most of the other trades were even on site. You're financing your earliest and most labor-loaded work for the entire life of the building.
The size of it
Retention on a carpentry sub works like a second line of credit you extended to the GC without approving it, and most books never separate it from ordinary AR. The owner reads a healthy receivable balance on Monday and can't fund payroll from it on Friday.
Rough framing is a first third activity. Trim, doors, casework install, and punch are the last things that happen before the owner walks the building. Retention of five to ten percent gets withheld on every draw starting with your first framing pay app, and none of it releases until the whole project closes out, so dollars earned in month two come back in month eighteen. Commercial millwork shops describe getting paid in 60 to 90 days on a good day, with retainage stacked on top of that and held effectively open ended.
Three moves, in order
Step 05: Software and bookkeeping alignment
Live job costs inside thirty seconds, with the bookkeeping cadence that keeps them current.
What else costs carpentry contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What carpentry owners ask
When does framing retention get released on a long commercial job?
Retention from framing you did two winters ago is still out there because that job hasn't closed. Carpentry starts early and ends on the last day, so both ends wait on one closeout.
What does it cost?
Retention on a carpentry sub works like a second line of credit you extended to the GC without approving it, and most books never separate it from ordinary AR. The owner reads a healthy receivable balance on Monday and can't fund payroll from it on Friday.
What do I do first?
Move retention into its own receivable account, then split it into rough and finish so you can see which end of the schedule your money is stuck at.
What are carpentry contractors supposed to be making?
No survey separates carpentry, so there is no figure of its own. The nearest comparable trade in the reference is Framing, which runs 18% gross margin, 13% overhead and 5% net profit before taxes at $1M–$5M, with a CFOS target of 10% net. Those are derived figures, not carpentry's own. Read them as the neighbourhood, and read your own job costing as the answer.
Which part of the system fixes it?
The step is number 05, software and bookkeeping alignment. Live job costs inside thirty seconds, with the bookkeeping cadence that keeps them current. It comes from chapter 5 of CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System.
Everything on this page is something you can install yourself, andCONTROL is the order to do it in. If you would rather buy the finished result, SPM The Construction CFO does this work for carpentry contractors as a service. It is a separate firm, Sulphur Prairie Management, LLC, run by the same author.
Wrote CONTROL, the 8 step system behind these figures. More about the author.