Client health
What the health score measures, how friction events feed it, and what it is deliberately not for.
Client health is an answer to a question most firms only ask once a year, usually too late: which of these relationships is actually worth keeping?
It combines two things a firm normally holds in separate places — what a client is worth, and what a client costs you in aggravation.
Where to find it
There's also a firm-wide view showing every client at once.
The two sub-scores
Economic — what the relationship is worth. Realisation, write-offs, whether the fee matches the work.
Operational — what it costs to serve. Responsiveness, rework, whether deadlines slip because of them or because of you.
Both roll into a composite. A client can score well economically and badly operationally — that's a specific, useful signal, and it's the case most firms are worst at seeing. The high-fee client everyone dreads doesn't show up in a revenue report as a problem.
Friction events
The operational side is partly built from friction events your team logs.
To log one:
- Open the client's Health tab.
- Click Log friction event.
- Choose a Category.
- Give it a Rating.
- Add a Note describing what happened.
Six categories are available: Rude or abusive, Unreasonable demands, Repeated rework, After-hours pressure, Scope pressure, and Chronic nonresponse.
How ratings stay honest
The dialog carries two pieces of guidance worth taking seriously.
Rate the interaction, not the person. The note prompt asks what happened and to keep it factual. A log entry that reads invoice queried for the fourth time on a settled scope is useful in six months. One that reads nightmare client is not.
Your rating counts — others' are hidden. You see your own rating and can't see what colleagues logged. That's deliberate: visible ratings converge, because the second person to rate anchors on the first. Hiding them keeps each rating independent, so a pattern across four people means four people actually saw it.
What it doesn't do
The score doesn't fire anything. Nothing is cancelled, no fee is adjusted, and no client is dropped because a number moved. It's an input to a conversation, not a decision.
It also can't score what it can't see. A client with no logged friction and no billing history isn't healthy — they're unmeasured. Scores held back for lack of evidence are shown as such rather than presented as a confident result.
Notes and limits
- Health display is role-gated. Not everyone at your firm sees scores.
- Scores are per client. Group members are scored individually.
- The score reflects the period it was computed over, not all history.
- Logging friction on a client doesn't notify anyone or change anything else about the record.