Unread-lead badge that only a human can clear

A red count on the rail for new leads nobody has opened, cleared only by actually opening the lead's card — not by visiting the board.

What it is

A per-person count of new leads with no view record. The write happens when the card opens and nowhere else, including when someone arrives by deep link from a notification email. Views are write-once, so the recorded time keeps pointing at the first read.

Also called: new lead alert · unopened leads · nobody looked at my enquiry · red badge

See it
Unread-lead badge that only a human can clear
New lead 4
Marlin Hoover
$39k
Delia Yoder
$21k
Contacted 3
Sutter Kline
$46k
Ronan Petsch
$56k
Estimate 4
Ivy Brubaker
$51k
Gideon Alt
$64k
Sold 4
Marlin Hoover
$49k
Delia Yoder
$58k
The rail's Sales Pipeline item with a red '3' badge, and the same badge in the collapsed rail as a 2px dot. Sample data — no customer information appears here.
How it works
  1. 1The rail fetches all its badge counts in one call and caches them per device.
  2. 2Opening a card fires a fire-and-forget view record, then tells the rail to re-count.
  3. 3The view upsert ignores duplicates, so the twentieth open is a no-op and the first-read time survives.
  4. 4Four exclusions keep it honest: not still in New lead, not active, archived, or already seen.
  5. 5Red is reserved for this one count — everything else on the rail uses the accent.
Why we built it

Quoted directly in the code, 'if there's a lead in the system that's brand new, and nobody's clicked on the sales pipeline to look at it… then that notification badge should stay there until they actually click on the lead and open up the opportunity modal.' The failure mode is spelled out too: 'a badge that clears on a lead nobody read is what loses the lead.' The deep-link path was a real bug — 'someone who opened a lead straight from its notification read the card and still had it counted as unseen.'

The problem
  • A badge that cleared on page load meant unread leads looked handled.
  • Deep links from notification emails bypassed the read record.
  • Repeated opens overwrote the first-read time, destroying 'how long did this sit'.
Sound familiar?
What you get
An enquiry stays loud until a person actually opens it.
The first time anyone read a lead is recorded permanently.
Red on the rail keeps meaning one thing.

See it on your own jobs

Twenty minutes, your numbers, no slide deck. We’ll build one of your real buildings in front of you and send you the estimate link at the end — yours to keep either way.

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