Renewals to defend: the Renewal Defense Score and war room

A renewal deal can look fine on paper — right size, right date — while the account itself is quietly drifting. The Renewal Defense Score exists to catch that before the renewal conversation, using the operational reality Current already sees: tickets, hours, meetings, and project health.

Every open renewal deal gets a nightly-computed score from 0 to 100 (higher is safer), built from five weighted factors:

Current surfaces open renewal deals inside 90 days of close with a defense score under 40 as active escalations. What you see depends on who's looking: sales leadership sees every at-risk renewal across the tenant, while an account executive sees only the ones on deals they own or accounts they can view. It's the same list, scoped by the same ownership rules as the rest of the pipeline — not two separate screens.

A defense play is a templated checklist you attach to a renewal deal, built for the exact moment a score drops: re-confirm the renewal with the primary contact, review and close or escalate any open tickets, check in-flight project health, book a value review and share the dossier, multi-thread to a second stakeholder, and confirm the renewal quote and terms. Checking items off is shared — the owning AE and leadership see the same live checklist.

The dossier is "your contract, delivered" — a partner-safe leave-behind you can hand straight to the account: tickets and hours trends across the renewal period, projects delivered (with an on-time flag), seat growth per service, and services currently covered. The partner-facing body is built from non-financial tables only, no MRR and no contract value, so it is safe to share externally.

The money sits behind a switch, "Show private profitability analysis", and it is on when the dossier opens. The switch appears only for sessions allowed to see financials — sales leadership, account executives, and workspace admins — and turning it off takes the account profitability section back off the screen. Nobody else sees the switch, and the numbers behind it are refused at the database layer rather than hidden in the page.

Print / PDF is partner-safe on its own. The internal section stays off the paper unless you tick "Include internal profitability in the print", the checkbox beside the Print / PDF button, and ticking it puts the section on the printout under an INTERNAL watermark. The tick only appears while the section is on screen, and it clears itself every time you open a different dossier, so it never carries from one account to the next.

The dossier's substrate refreshes on a weekly cadence so the numbers you hand a partner are current without recomputing on every click.

Inside that section is the answer to the question behind every renewal: are we making money on this account? Current sets the trailing twelve months of revenue against what it cost to serve the account. The verdict on top is labeled "Recurring services margin" and measures exactly that — the recurring contract on its own — because a renewal re-prices the contract, not last year's project. The "Gross margin (12 mo)" hero tile on the company record reads the same recurring figure.

Recurring revenue is the contract MRR you bill today multiplied by the months in the window, and it is labeled "at current contract pricing" for that reason: it is what the account is worth now, not what it was invoiced over the year. Cost comes in three lines: service ticket labor mirrored from your PSA, project time tracked in Current, and the vendor cost carried on the contract lines themselves — vendor cost counts against recurring services only, because there is no contract behind a project or a one-off. Both sides of that arithmetic are now converted to a monthly figure using the period each service is priced in rather than the period the contract bills in, so an annual service on a monthly contract counts as a twelfth of its price per month and a monthly service on an annually billed contract counts at its full price.

• ＋Recurring revenue for the window, at current contract pricing.
• ＋One-time & project revenue, as your PSA actually billed it.
• ＋Labor cost, split into ticket hours and project hours, with any unpriced hours named on the tile and the cost of each revenue type underneath it.
• ＋Vendor cost, with the contract lines behind it counted three ways: lines that carry a cost, lines whose cost is zero, and lines with no cost on file.
• ＋Recurring gross profit, with the monthly cost of serving the contract under it.
• ＋Effective rate: what the contract pays per hour of recurring work. The value delivered block below sets the hours against your workspace blended rate.
• ＋Cost by month against monthly revenue, hours and cost by ticket queue, and a cost mix bar.

The verdict reads against two numbers a workspace admin sets, starting at 55 percent gross margin for green and 40 for amber, with red below that. When an account is under the green target the banner runs the arithmetic backwards and names the MRR that would reach it at what the contract costs to serve. That is the number to open a price conversation with.

One company record usually holds more than one business, so a table called "Revenue and cost by type" splits them apart. Recurring services is the contract MRR at your current pricing, and it carries the verdict alone. Projects is billed project work; when part of that money sits on projects that are not tracked in Current, the row names the amount, because no labor sits behind that part here. One-time & T&M is billed ticket work and charges. Other billed catches setup fees and contract-side charges the rules could not place — real money, with no labor attributed to them and no margin claimed. All in adds the whole account together.

Hours are attributed to those rows by the billable flag your PSA already holds. Covered hours count against recurring services, hours your PSA marked billable count against one-time and T&M, and hours on Current-tracked projects count against projects. Hours carrying no flag at all count against recurring services, which is the cautious side of the line, and the notes under the table say how many there were.

Under the table, Current prints what your PSA actually billed for recurring services in the window against what current pricing says it should be, with the gap as a percentage. The verdict still uses current pricing, because that is what a renewal changes; a wide gap points at a mid-window price change, a credit, or a contract that is not billing what it says. Project and one-time revenue come from your PSA's billed items, and until those have been mirrored for your workspace those cells read "Revenue not mirrored yet" rather than a zero — their labor cost still shows, because the hours were really worked. The first mirror walk covers 400 days and the lane keeps up from there.

The vendor cost tile carries a "See lines" control for sales leadership and workspace admins. It opens every active line on the account's active recurring contracts: the service or bundle name, how many units, the unit price and the unit cost, the period that price is quoted in, what both work out to per month, and the margin on that line. The totals row is the monthly figure behind the tile, and the tile shows that cost across the whole window, twelve months on the company page, so divide the tile by the months in the window to reconcile the two. Either way you can follow the vendor figure down to the service that produced it and open that service in your PSA.

A cost that cannot be right is left out of the margin rather than believed. Two shapes qualify: a unit cost more than double the unit price, and a unit cost of 5,000 or more on a line priced at nothing (the shape of a catalog placeholder). That 5,000 is the US dollar figure, and the threshold scales with your workspace currency, so a pound workspace flags at 4,000 and a yen workspace at 750,000. Those lines are labeled "check this line in Autotask", their numbers are shown, the tile counts how many were held back, and the notes under the tiles say how much monthly cost that was — so a typo in a cost field cannot quietly flatter or wreck an account's margin. The line table repeats the same figure in its own caption. A cost on a zero-price line below that, the shape of a service sold inside a per-user seat, is counted in full.

Account executives and sales leadership see the account-level numbers: margin, cost to serve, effective hourly rate, hours. The breakdown by technician, with each person's name, hours, cost and where their rate came from, is shown to workspace admins only, and the cost rates themselves stay where they have always been, in Settings, admin only. Partner viewers get none of it, refused at the database layer rather than hidden in the interface.