Which Contacts Ace Works — and How to Exclude the Rest

Teams run more than prospects through Follow Up Boss — a realtor list, lender and title partners, vendors, recruiting targets, staff. Ace sorts every contact into a role and only works the ones that are real prospects. This article covers how that sorting works, how to correct it for your own database, and the one thing it does not do.

What you will have when you are done

Your own rules saved, and every existing contact re-checked against them — so your realtors, partners and vendors stop appearing in scores, suggestions, queues, Automations and Autopilot.

Exclude a whole list (stages, tags or sources)

1. In the Ace admin dashboard, open Back Office, then the Recruiting tab, then click Contact roles.
2. Under Your rules, add the stages that mean "not a client" to Stages that mean 'not a client'. If your realtors sit in a stage called Realtor, add that. Do the same for tags and lead sources that mean the same thing, and add your own email domains under Your own email domains so staff records are treated as internal.
3. Click Save. Ace re-checks your existing contacts against the new rules — the page tells you whether that re-check was actually queued, and shows when it finishes.

The tag and stage boxes suggest the vocabulary Ace has already seen in your CRM, so you can pick rather than type. You can still type something it has not seen.

Exclude one contact

Add the tag ace-ignore to a contact in Follow Up Boss and Ace leaves them out of every AI surface. Add ace-include to force one back in when a rule or a guess has caught them by mistake. Ace reads those tags straight from the contact, so there is no separate list here to keep in sync.

ace-ignore is the strongest signal there is — it beats your rules and Ace's own guesses. ace-include beats everything except ace-ignore.

Or do it from your queue, in one tap

You do not have to go into Follow Up Boss for this. On any row in your Ace queue, open the row's menu and choose Not a prospect — "not a client at all". It does the same thing as the ace-ignore tag: the contact stops surfacing in scores, suggestions, queues, Automations and Autopilot, and your judgement feeds the same sorting Ace uses everywhere else.

Two differences worth knowing. It is saved on your Ace side only — it does not add a tag or change anything in Follow Up Boss, so a teammate looking at the record in the CRM will not see it. And it is reversible: use Restore on the same contact to put them back and hand the decision back to Ace's own sorting. Use the ace-ignore tag instead when you want the exclusion visible to your whole team inside the CRM.

The roles Ace sorts into

• Prospect — a real potential or actual client. The default, and the only role Ace works.
• Partner — lender, title, escrow, inspector, appraiser, insurance.
• Agent — other agents, co-op agents, recruiting targets.
• Vendor — contractors, photographers, stagers, service providers.
• Internal — your own team, staff, test and system contacts.
• Other business — contacts belonging to a non-real-estate side business.
• Do not contact — trash, spam and do-not-contact stages.

What Ace guesses on its own

The built-in patterns are deliberately conservative, because wrongly calling a real lead a vendor silently drops them from every AI surface — worse than analysing a lender. So Ace only guesses when a stage or tag is unambiguous:

• A stage whose name is the word — Realtor, Agent, Broker, Real Estate Agent — is read as an agent. A stage named "Agent referral" is not.
• Stages containing lender, title, escrow, vendor or recruiting are read as partner, vendor or agent.
• Stages named Trash, Spam, Junk, DNC or Do Not Call/Contact/Email are excluded. Cold, Unresponsive and Archived are deliberately not — re-engaging quiet leads is the point of the product.
• Tags that name a role — lender, loan officer, title rep, appraiser, recruiting, co-op agent, vendor, photographer, staff — are read as that role. A tag that only mentions one is not: "needs lender", "referred by realtor" and "imported lender: Jane" all stay prospects.
• A bare realtor, agent or broker tag is not treated as a role, because it is too often used to mean "referred by one". If that is how your database marks its agents, add the tag under Your rules — that is exactly what the box is for.

Why a contact can still carry an old role

Ace stores each contact's role and re-checks it when that contact gets activity in Follow Up Boss. A contact that has been quiet for a long time can therefore still be carrying a verdict from before your rules — or from before Ace learned a pattern. Saving a rule change is the fix: it re-checks your whole database rather than waiting for each contact to move.

If a role still looks wrong afterwards, check the contact for an ace-include tag, and check Tags Ace stopped trusting under Advanced — a tag that appears on a very large share of your database cannot be a role signal, so Ace stops using it for guessing. Adding it under Your rules makes it count again.

What changes when a contact is excluded

Excluded contacts drop out of analysis and scoring, suggestions and drafts, the Seller Radar scan, the neglect sweep, Automations and Autopilot. They stay in Follow Up Boss, untouched — Ace simply stops working them.

Two things this does not do

Ace columns already written onto those contacts keep their last values. The re-check stops Ace working a contact from that moment on, but it does not blank an Ace Win Score or Ace Churn Risk already sitting on the record in Follow Up Boss. Clearing those from a large list is a separate job — contact support with your account name and we will look at it.

Excluding contacts does not lower your Ace Trove price. The Trove tier is sized on the total contact count in your Follow Up Boss database, quoted automatically from Follow Up Boss — excluded contacts are not subtracted from that number. Exclusions control what Ace works, not how the tier is measured. The tier table is in What Is Ace Trove? Overview and Pricing.

Advanced: the two switches that REMOVE Ace's own rules

Leave both of these switched off. Under Advanced there are two switches — Stop Ace recognizing junk stages on its own and Stop Ace recognizing partner and vendor tags on its own. They do not add exclusions. They remove the ones Ace already applies without being asked, so that only the stages and tags you typed in yourself count for anything.

Switch either one on and contacts you have already marked as junk start getting worked again — including everyone in a "Trash" stage, and everyone tagged "Do Not Contact", which Ace otherwise treats as a hard stop. If there is something you want excluded, add it to your own lists above instead. You never need to touch these switches to exclude anything.