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Client Referrals: How the Sphere Graph Works and What Closes Automatically

Updated August 13, 2026

Client Referrals is the sphere graph: one record per introduction, tracking who sent you whom, what stage it reached, and what it eventually produced. It answers the question most agents can only guess at — which of my past clients actually sends me business?

What you'll have when you're done

  • A named list of the past clients who actually send you business — not a guess.
  • Your history backfilled, so the list is useful on day one instead of in a year.
  • A short "Referrers to confirm" queue where you settle the uncertain ones yourself.
  • Won deals closing their own referrals automatically, with the observed commission attached — or nothing at all.

Your first win, in about 10 minutes

Every seat can do this, including free ones. Retro-detection reads your history and creates records — it sends nothing to anyone, so there is no risk in running it.

  1. Open Book of Business → Referrals (agents: Referrals in the Ace Companion). There is no top-level Referrals row in the sidebar — it is a tab.
  2. Find the retro-detection card and press Run backfill. Ace infers past introductions from your Follow Up Boss lead sources and tags. Free seats scan up to 500 contacts; paid seats are uncapped. Give it a few minutes.
  3. Open Referrers to confirm and work the queue — the column literally asks Who did they mean? Confirm credits that ambassador exactly once; Reject records your verdict without crediting anyone. Anything Ace was not sure about is held here rather than guessed.
  4. Read the Ambassador book. The names at the top of the GCI sourced (est.) column are the people to call this month.
  5. Call three of them. Ace can draft the touch, but nothing sends itself — every outreach waits for you.
The Referrers to confirm queue, with inferred referrers awaiting a verdict, the evidence behind each guess and the candidate matches to confirm or reject
The Ambassador book listing each referrer with their owner, referral and closed counts, estimated GCI sourced and last touch, including rows labelled retro-detected and not yet confirmed
Not to be confused with the separate referral program that gives your account billing credit for referring another brokerage. That is a different feature entirely. This article is about your clients introducing you to people.

Who can use it

  • Every seat can see it. Free seats get the full product with the graph and ambassador lists capped at 25 rows.
  • Regular and Pro seats lift the row caps.
  • The return-on-investment headline is never gated — it shows on every plan.
  • Ace Trove adds the drill-down: the named deals behind the number. This is a Trove capability, not a Pro one.

Where to find it

Admin: Book of Business → Referrals tab. Agents: Referrals in the Ace Companion.

How an introduction gets into the graph

  1. Capture surfaces feed it automatically. When someone arrives through a shared client packet, a forwarded Ace Page, or another capture surface that identifies who forwarded it, that becomes an edge.
  2. Retro-detection backfills your history. Press Run backfill on the retro-detection card once, and Ace infers past introductions from Follow Up Boss lead sources and tags. Free seats scan up to 500 contacts; paid seats are uncapped.
  3. You confirm the uncertain ones. Inferred referrers land in a "Referrers to confirm" queue. Confirm credits that ambassador exactly once; Reject records your verdict without crediting anyone.
  4. Inferred vs. confirmed is always visible as a chip. Ace never quietly promotes a guess into a fact.
Ambiguity is never guessed. When two people are equally plausible as the referrer, Ace marks it "needs review" rather than picking one. And identifying a person by name never upgrades how confident Ace claims to be about the introduction itself.

What closes automatically

When a deal is won in Follow Up Boss, Ace finds the open introductions pointing at the people on that deal, attaches the deal and its commission, and advances those referrals to closed. You don't mark anything.

  • It runs on every plan — a plan change never strands an open referral.
  • It is safe to re-run: an already-closed referral is skipped, never double-counted.
  • The commission attached is the observed figure from the deal, or nothing at all. Ace deliberately does not substitute a median or an industry average here — a modeled number on a referral would read as real sourced commission.

Honest limitations

  • The graph counts only what it can see. A phone introduction that was never tagged, tracked, or recorded is invisible, and nothing recovers it. Treat the ambassador list as a floor.
  • A deal introduced by two people credits both in full. The value is per introduction, not a split share — for the same reason Ace refuses to invent a split on a co-listed deal. Don't sum the column and call it total referral revenue.
  • Referral dollar figures are always treated as estimates and labeled that way, even when they came from an observed commission.
  • Nothing sends itself. Every outreach Ace prepares for your sphere — the anniversary touch, the value touch — is a draft that waits for you. There is no auto-send path anywhere in this feature.
The retro-detection card before a run, explaining that the scan is local and LLM-free and that detected edges stay inferred until confirmed, with its Run backfill button

Why Ace never offers your clients anything

You will notice that Ace never proposes a gift, a credit, a reward, a fee, or a thank-you payment for an introduction, and that client-facing copy avoids the word "referral" altogether.

That is deliberate and it is structural, not a setting. Real-estate settlement law (RESPA §8) prohibits giving or accepting anything of value for the referral of settlement-service business. So Ace's referral records cannot express value flowing to a referrer at all — fields like points, reward credits, gift value, or payout are refused outright rather than quietly stripped, at every layer that touches the record. Measuring what a closed deal was worth to you is fine; paying someone for sending it is not something the product can be made to do.

Never tell a client they will "earn," "be rewarded for," "get credit for," or "be thanked with" anything for an introduction. There is no such mechanism, and promising one creates a compliance problem for the agent. Ask for the introduction because you did good work.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need Ace Trove for referrals?
No. The graph, the ambassador book, and the headline return figure are available on every plan. Trove adds the named-deal drill-down.

Will running retro-detection message anyone?
No. It reads your history and creates records. It sends nothing.

Can I set up a client rewards program in Ace?
No, and it is not a missing feature — see above.

A referral shows closed but no commission.
The deal had no commission recorded in Follow Up Boss. Ace leaves it blank rather than modeling one.

Last updated: August 2026

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