Why you want to refine ? Just for the process or for premium ? I was struggling with selling low Rh material, so we needed to figure out how to bring the content from 0,5-2% to >15% in melt. It took one yeatr of my research on how to do it at sane ammount of steps and overall effectivity more than 93% to the enriched fraction. Yes, it could be certainly done very elegant way, and all PGM industry will laugh at my approach straight away... But with practically no exact informations from the literature or other sources, such as this forum, I am actually proud that I achieved it.
Refining Rh to more than 99% purity to chase premiums is another league to do right, and not in very complicated way. Yes, you can relatively easily make 99% Rh with traditional and conventional methods, but the overall efficiency of the process is not great. Espetially if you start with low Rh feed, as I was struggling with (0,5-2% Rh in PtPd). You could easily end up in several concentration and retrieval cycles to get the content up to 20% from startin 1%. Very tiring to do it only with ammonium chloride, altough it can be done.
Sharp separation could be done with hydrolysis. Oxidative conditions and enough boiling can produce nice packed precipitate. But this become tedious if the content of Rh gets higher - big big volume of voluminous precpiptate, sometimes harder to filter, but essentially OK.
If you are more interested in NH4Cl method, be aware of partial hydrolysis, as Lou mentioned. Platinum and rhodium in solution have both octahedral coordination sphere, where Cl anions could easily replace with OH or H2O ligands. If you do this only in plain water, non-acidified, you can easily loose the Cl ligands (as all complex molecules are in equilibrium in presence of other ligands - here, it is water) and make Rh less soluble. Also Pd behave similarly. On the other hand, in more concentrated acid solutions, separations are much less sharp and drag of other PGMs with precipitate is much bigger.
Lou described much more user friendly process how to do this. You will always be left with some mixed fractions of this and that, that need to be resolved, or better added to another batch. This is most tedious thing in my opinion, processing all various fractions of various ratios of PGMs contained, in various chemical forms (metal ppt, salts, oxides, chlorocomplexes...).
That is where skilled chemist must optimize the process of refining to cut the ammount of mixed fractions and cut the number of operations to minimum to save precious time.
With PGMs there anr numerous methods of purification and extraction, conventional precipitations, solvent extractions, selective resins etc. There is immense number of possibilities how to combine the steps required to afford 3N metals at the end.