Signal · Revenue-quality

Revenue at risk

Trailing-12m revenue tied to clients who have gone quiet, are paying late, or are slowing down — one number summarising near-term exposure.

Revenue-quality

What the signal measures

Trailing-12m revenue tied to clients who have gone quiet, are paying late, or are slowing down — one number summarising near-term exposure.

Why it matters

This is the headline £ number tied to clients Compass has flagged as quiet, chronically late, or slowing their invoicing pace. Any single-signal £ can be a false alarm; the aggregate is far harder to ignore. For a service business, the delta between "trading well" and "in trouble" is often a small number of silent losses — a £15k retainer client who drops off feels manageable in isolation and terrifying when you realise three of them have gone without anyone noticing.

How to act on it

Treat revenue-at-risk as a top-of-week diagnostic. Drill into each contributing insight — silent-churn for the quiet clients, smart-collections-triage for the late payers, land-vs-expand for the slowing ones — and pick the two or three highest-£ moves. Compass drafts the first email or price note for each, so the marginal effort of a Monday-morning re-engagement pass is a few minutes rather than an afternoon.

Worked example — fixture consultancy

On Meridian Consulting the top contributors are Cobalt Retail (gone silent since November 2025 — worth roughly £30k of retainer revenue over the following months), Brightwave Agency (three unpaid invoices totalling roughly £18k, 45+ days late) and Dovetail Ltd (invoiced twice-monthly at a low day rate but chronic late-payer, now with a growing unpaid stack). Compass surfaces them together as one number worth six weeks of typical retainer income — hard to ignore, straightforward to act on.