Client Red-Flag Scorer

Everybody in trade work has a list of signals in their head. This writes it down, weights it, and then does the thing that separates a tool from a listicle: it checks whether the list is any good.

Twelve signals, each with a weight, and every weight visible on the page and editable. They are my judgement about what these signals usually mean, not data about your business, and the tool says exactly that rather than hiding it behind a score out of a hundred.

The field that matters most is the smallest one. When a job finishes, come back and mark it as fine or bad. After eight or so, the tool compares the enquiries it warned you about against the ones it did not, and tells you how many in each group went wrong. That comparison is the only evidence on the page and it is yours, not mine.

And if your scoring turns out not to separate anything, it says so — in those words, with the two rates side by side, and a suggestion to change the weights or stop using the score. A number that does not separate anything is worse than no number, and a tool that only ever congratulates its own scoring is not worth nineteen dollars.

Two things it will not do. It will not tell you to turn work down: a high score in a quiet month is still a job, and the right answer is usually to price it for the trouble rather than to refuse it. And it holds nothing about anybody but what you type, because nothing here leaves your browser.

Save as many versions as you like and put any two side by side, figure against figure, with the better one on each line marked and the difference in its own column. That screen is the one that decides things, and it is the part a free calculator cannot do at all.

This is a structured way to record what you noticed, not a measurement of a person. Treat it as the former and it is useful; treat it as the latter and it is not.

One HTML file. No account, no subscription, no internet needed. Opens on Windows, Mac and Android; the readme explains the extra step on iPhone and iPad, where Apple blocks JavaScript in downloaded files and every tool of this kind is affected.

Everything lives in your browser on your device. Nothing is uploaded, which is why it works offline and why nobody else can see your figures — and it also means clearing your browsing data deletes it. The tool does not pretend otherwise: the header shows how long since your last export at all times, turns amber after three days and red after seven, and export is one click that produces a plain file you keep.