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Working With A Variable Rate Retainage Contract in Prolog
Contract terms can sometimes call for special methods for handling retainage. One such term is a variable rate which says at the completion of a certain percentage of work, the retainage held for future work is subject to a lower rate.
Unfortunately, Prolog does not have a built in way of handling this. In Prolog, when you change the retainage percent, the entire completed value recalculates against the percentage entered, releasing the previously held retainage and showing the difference in the amount due. Because of this, if you want to “freeze” the current retainage and then withhold a different rate moving forward, simply changing the retainage percent will not work.
In the walkthrough below, I will show how to easily handle variable rate retainage for the scenario explained above. I will be using the Application for Payment module, but the exact same steps can be used for entering Contract Invoices as well. Keep in mind, although the number of steps is lengthy once you have done this procedure a couple of times the total time takes less than 1 minute to do.
1. Open the previous Application for Payment record.
2. Click the column header for “General Retain Value”. All the data fields underneath will be highlighed.
3. Press Ctrl + C to copy the data.
4. Open a new Excel document.
5. Select cell E1 and then press Ctrl + V to paste. You will see all the amounts from your previous Application for Payment’s “General Retain Value” appear.
6. In Prolog, create a new Application for Payment for the current period.
7. Enter all your invoice amounts like normal.
8. Once finished entering the amounts, click the column header for “Work This Invoice Value”. The entire row will be highlighted like in the previous step.
9. Press Ctrl + C to copy the data.
10. In Excel, select cell B1 and press Ctrl + V to paste the data. The “Work This Invoice Value” amounts will be populated into Excel.
11. Repeat the copy and paste procedure for the “Description” column in the current Application for Payment into cell A1 in Excel.
12. In column C of your Excel spread sheet, enter the retainage percent (remember a percentage is between 0 and 1, so enter it as a decimal) you want to withhold on each line item. Note: If you have added Change Orders to your application, there will be more current items (Columns A-C) than previous (Column E). This is Ok.
13. In cell D1, create a formula which is cell B1 times C1. This will give you the retainage for this item on the current invoice. Copy this formula for all items.
14. In cell F1, create a formula which is cell D1 plus E1. This will give you the total retainage for this item as of the current invoice. Copy this formula for all items.
15. Highlight all the cells in column F which have data. Do not click the column header to select the cells, you must highlight only the utilized cells.
16. Press Ctrl + C to copy the amounts.
17. In Prolog, on the current Application for Payment, click the column header for “General Retain Value”. This will select all cells in the column.
18. Press Ctrl + V to paste the dollar amounts copied from Excel.
19. Save the Application for Payment.
The column for "General Retain Percent" will automatically calculate to adjust itself to the values you pasted. |
