There's a number in your business you've earned, you've invoiced, and you legally cannot collect yet.
On a project in BC it's ten percent of the work you've actually provided. Whoever owes it to you is required to hold it, they can't agree to skip it even if both of you want to, and it stays held until fifty-five days after the certificate of completion is issued, with no liens filed. Ontario's number is ten as well.
So go into your job management software and find where that ten percent lives.
I went and read ServiceM8's own list of the fields an invoice template can use. There's a total, a subtotal, materials, labour, tax, a deposit amount, a balance due. There's no retainage field on that list, no holdback field, and nothing that takes a percentage off a draw. The holdback goes on as a typed line or a template modification, and the running balance of what's being held across every open contract lives in your accounting system.
I work on ServiceM8. You should know that before you weigh what I just said about it. The missing field is a symptom. The cause sits upstream of any single product.
Your work comes in two shapes.
A service call is one visit. One job card, one invoice at the end, and the work record and the money record close in the same week. That's the shape the whole software category was designed around.
A project is a contract. It runs for months, it gets billed in draws against a schedule of values, holdback comes off the draws that carry it, and the price moves partway through because change orders happen. The work record has to stay open while the money record moves five or six times.
Field service software is built for the first shape, and the job is the unit of everything inside it. Scheduling, costing, reporting, invoicing, all of it hangs off one job that gets quoted, done, invoiced, closed.
Here's what that costs you on the second shape.
Progress invoicing exists, and in ServiceM8 it works by splitting. You tick the items you're billing this month, and in their words, "A duplicate of the original job will be created with the selected items, ready to be invoiced. The original job will have the split amount taken off." Your cash flow gets solved. What you give up is the contract as one thing you can open and look at, because after six draws it's spread across the original job number and six lettered copies of it.
It moves whole items, too, so billing twenty percent of one line and thirty percent of another doesn't map to a control. One way to hold it is the schedule of values as your quote lines, with each month's draw entered as its own lines. That's what any tool looks like when it's built around one shape of work and you hand it another.
So the ledger splits. The projects get invoiced out of the accounting system and the job system holds the hours, which solves the billing problem and costs you the thing you bought the job system for. The project's labour sits in one place and the project's money sits in the other, and nobody can tell you what a project made until someone joins them by hand.
The size of this is a number you already have. Go back over last year's contracts and pull the ones where holdback was retained. Ten percent of those came off as you billed them, and most of it doesn't release until well past the end of the job. If a third of a three million dollar year runs through contracts like that, ten percent is a hundred thousand dollars sitting in a balance your job system never recorded.
Then ask whether that share is growing, because the answer changes what you should be buying.
There's a faster diagnostic than any of this, and you already own it. Take one of your own progress invoices, a real one you sent to a general contractor, and try to produce it out of your job system. The schedule of values layout. The previously-billed column. The holdback line. The contract number they reference on every draw. Whatever you can't reproduce is your gap, named precisely.
If you'd rather have that run against your own contracts, with the account built around what it turns up, https://www.chanautomation.com/servicem8-consultant-canada.
The thing to carry past this email: the split doesn't stop at invoicing. Job costing, margin reporting, what "complete" means, whether a job is running late, all of it sits on the assumption that a piece of work is one visit long. Worth asking which of your numbers are quietly measuring a shape your business already grew out of.
Kevin Chan
The Ops Shortcut by ChanAutomation
https://www.chanautomation.com/servicem8-consultant-canada