Tracking account health without a usage feed
The SaaS pack does not read usage from your product. How to keep a usage score by hand or by import, and what the home-page counts can tell you.
By Achekam · · 4 min read · For Software (SaaS) businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
Launching soon. The Industry CRM add-on described in this article is launching soon. This article describes it as it will work at launch.
The renewal call is next week. The account manager opens the account, sees a friendly e-mail thread and a paid invoice, and expects an easy conversation. The customer then explains that half their team stopped logging in after the first quarter and they are not sure the product is worth keeping.
The warning was there all along, in your product's own data. It just never reached the place where the account manager works. That gap is what an account health score is meant to close, and it is worth being clear about how Achekam's SaaS pack handles it before you rely on it.
Why usage matters at renewal time
Customers rarely cancel software in a single moment. Usage fades first: fewer people sign in, a key feature stops being used, an administrator leaves and nobody replaces them. By the time the customer says they want to cancel, the decision was made months earlier.
A usage score turns that fading into something an account manager can see and act on early, while there is still time to retrain a team, fix an integration or adjust the plan. Without it, renewals are judged on how pleasant the last e-mail was. David Skok's guide to SaaS metrics explains how churn is measured alongside recurring revenue, customer lifetime value and acquisition cost.
What the pack does not read
The SaaS pack does not read usage from your product. It has no connection to your application's database, your analytics tool or your login records. A usage score in the pack is typed in or imported.
That is a deliberate limit, and it is better to know it now than to discover it at the first renewal. It also has an upside. Every software company measures usage differently, and a score you define and maintain yourself reflects what actually predicts renewal in your business, not a generic formula someone else chose.
The pack itself works in the language of a software company: customers are Accounts, records are Opportunities, projects are Onboarding projects and quotes are Order forms. The usage score sits alongside that, as information your team supplies.
Typing in or importing a usage score
Before anyone enters a score, decide what it means. Keep the definition on one page and make sure everyone reads it the same way. A workable approach:
- Pick a few signals. For example: how many of the seats bought are actively used, whether the customer uses the feature they bought the product for, and whether an administrator is still active.
- Band them. Decide what counts as strong, middling and weak for each signal in plain words.
- Combine them into one score using a rule that does not change from month to month.
- Set a rhythm. Update every account at the same point each month, from the same report.
For a handful of accounts, typing the score in is fine. Once you have more accounts than one person can update in an hour, import it: export the figures from your product's reporting each month, turn them into scores with your rule, and import the scores into the pack. Importing keeps the source consistent and saves the account managers from copying numbers by hand.
Home-page counts that come from records and tasks
Each industry pack sets the words the screens use, its record types, its pipelines and workflows, and the counts on its home page. Those home-page counts in the Industry CRM come from records, tasks or the ledger. None of them is typed in by hand.
The sources the counts draw on are:
- open records, and records in a given stage;
- pipeline value;
- overdue tasks and tasks due today;
- key dates in the next 7 days;
- deals won this month and revenue this month.
So while the usage score depends on what you enter or import, the home page reflects work that has actually been recorded. An account manager who sees overdue tasks piling up on an account, or a key date approaching with nothing scheduled, has a second warning that does not depend on the score being current.
Keeping the score honest
A typed-in score is only as good as the habits around it. These rules keep it useful:
- One source. Take the figures from the same product report every time.
- One rule. Never adjust a score by feel. If the account manager thinks the score is wrong, change the rule for everyone or add a note, but leave the score as calculated.
- Visible age. Agree a date by which all scores are updated, and treat a score older than that as unknown.
- Pair it with notes. A low score with a note saying "customer paused hiring" reads very differently from one with no explanation.
- Keep the history. A score that has fallen three months running tells a different story from one that has always been low.
- Act on it. Agree what happens when a score falls into the weak band: a call, a training offer, a review of the plan. A score nobody acts on is decoration.
The usage score earns its place long before renewal. A trial that shows strong usage is exactly what makes a lead product-qualified, as described in from product trial to won deal. When a weak score ends in a seat reduction, credit notes when a customer reduces seats covers the billing side, and moving a young company's books off spreadsheets helps if those invoices still live in a spreadsheet.
Write your one-page score definition before you switch the pack on, and pick the date each month when every account gets its new number.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
