Renovation Payment Schedule, and Who Is Funding the Job

The convention

The common Singapore shape is ten per cent as a deposit on confirmation, forty per cent after hacking and masonry, forty per cent on carpentry, and the final ten per cent on handover.

The structure is doing something specific. Hacking and masonry come early and carry real material and labour cost; carpentry is usually the largest single trade at roughly thirty per cent of the budget and has to be paid for before it is installed. The two forty per cent stages sit where the money actually leaves your account.

Tie every stage to a trade, never to a date

A stage triggered by work being finished is a fact. Both of you can stand in the flat and agree that the masonry is done. A stage triggered by a date is a forecast, and every renovation slips.

This matters most when the delay is the client changing their mind. If the schedule runs on dates, their indecision moves your payment. If it runs on trades, the work you have finished is the work you invoice for, whatever is still being decided elsewhere in the flat.

Where the ten per cent deposit does not reach

Ten per cent on a $45,000 job is $4,500, against hacking, disposal, permits and the first material orders. For many jobs it is thin, and the gap is funded by the contractor until the second stage lands.

That is survivable on one job and not on four at once. If you are running several projects with staggered second stages, the shortfall compounds, and the usual symptom is a healthy order book alongside an empty account.

• —Count the cash out before the second stage, not just the deposit in
• —Stagger project starts rather than second stages
• —Put the trigger in writing so an invoice is never a negotiation

The final ten per cent

The last stage is a retention in everything but name, and it is the one most often delayed. Defining handover precisely in the quotation is what makes it collectable: what constitutes completion, what a defects list covers, and how long the client has to raise one.

A schedule that says "10% on completion" with no definition of completion is a schedule with an open end, and the open end is always at your expense.

Put it on the quotation

The schedule belongs on the document with the stages, the percentages and the triggers written out, alongside the validity period and your payment details. It is not a conversation to have after the job is won, because by then the client has already decided what they think the terms are.

All of it carries through automatically if it is set once in your branding and terms rather than retyped per quote.