Completing and closing out a plan

What "complete" and "closed" mean

A plan has two separate finish lines, and Verinode tracks them separately.

Marking a step complete checks off one piece of work inside a plan, IQ is a fractional COO, not the decision-maker, so it drafts the plan and you tell it when a step is actually done. Checking off steps updates the plan's progress bar and its due-date timeline, but the decision underneath it stays open.

Closing the project is the final act: you tell Verinode how the whole thing turned out, rate whether the plan itself was worth running, and optionally log what actually landed in dollars. Closing is what moves the decision to Resolved. It takes about fifteen seconds, only one field is required beyond the reason, and it is the only moment Verinode asks you directly "did this work?"

Both live in the same place: Action Plans, in the sidebar, at /actions.

Where to find it

Open Action Plans from the sidebar. It shows every decision you have kicked off, whether the plan is still being drafted, ready to start, in progress, or finished, one row per plan. The default view is the Gantt (a construction-style timeline); a Calendar view is also available from the view toggle in the top-right of the page, and mobile shows a vertical list instead of the grid.

The filter dropdown next to search buckets your plans by urgency: All, Planning, Ready to start, Overdue, Due today, Due tomorrow, Later, Completed. "Completed" means every step is checked off but the project has not been closed out yet, that bucket is Verinode's reminder that a plan is waiting on your fifteen seconds of feedback.

Marking a step complete

On the desktop Gantt, each plan renders as one row: a label on the left (title, entity, dollar impact) and a segmented bar on the right spanning from the day you started the plan to the last step's due date. Each segment is one step, colored by its status:

• Green, completed
• Red, overdue
• Copper (full strength), due today
• Copper (lighter), due tomorrow
• Copper (faint), upcoming
• Gray, dashed, not started yet

Hover any segment and a small tooltip opens showing the step number, its status, its title, and its due date ("Due Mar 12"). Two buttons sit at the bottom of that tooltip:

• Mark complete (or Undo complete if it is already checked off) flips that one step's status immediately. The bar re-colors and the label column's progress counter updates the moment you click, no page reload.
• Open plan takes you into the full decision workspace for that item, where the same steps, plus templates, related research, and the plan's own controls, live in full.

Clicking the segment itself (instead of a tooltip button) also opens the plan. Clicking the row's label does the same.

Under the plan title in the label column, a small counter reads "X/N steps" with a thin copper progress bar beneath it, this is the same completed-step count driving the Gantt bar's coloring. A vertical copper line marks today's date across the whole board so you can see at a glance which bars are about to cross into overdue territory.

At the bottom of the Gantt, a legend spells out the five colors (Completed, Overdue, Due today, Tomorrow, Upcoming) plus a reminder: "Hover a step for details · click the bar or any step to open the plan."

On mobile, each plan is a tappable row instead of a Gantt bar. It shows the next incomplete step's status and due date plus its title, or, once every step is checked off, the row reads "All steps complete" in green. Tapping the row opens the same workspace.

The close-out prompt

The moment your last step gets checked off, the decision workspace surfaces a floating card in the bottom-right corner:

All steps done Close the project and share what worked, your feedback helps the network learn.

with a Close project button and a Later button. Later just dismisses the card for that visit, nothing is lost, the plan stays in the "Completed" bucket on the Action Plans board until you do close it.

There is a second way into the same dialog. If you decide a decision without ever running a plan, using your own judgment or handling it outside Verinode entirely, the decision workspace shows a Mark as handled button alongside Act, Not now, and Ignore. This only appears when no plan exists yet. It opens the identical dialog, just retitled to fit: this is Verinode's "I've got this, record the outcome" path for decisions you closed the loop on without asking IQ to draft steps.

The Close Project dialog

Whichever door you came in through, the dialog itself is the same form, titled Close project when you worked through a plan, or Mark as handled when you did not. The subtitle adjusts to match: "15 seconds of feedback. Only the rating is required" for a worked plan, or "Capture why, so the network learns when to push versus when to let it go" when you are closing without one.

1. 1How did it end? (required). Pick one of five outcomes, each shown as a card with a short hint:
2. 2- Completed; it worked, all steps done, outcome landed as planned
3. 3- Solved earlier than planned, outcome landed before the plan finished
4. 4- Abandoned; didn't pan out, stopped working on it, no meaningful result
5. 5- Failed; made things worse, the approach backfired, you'd avoid it next time
6. 6- No longer relevant, circumstances changed, the plan is moot
7. 7Actual impact captured (optional). A dollar field, pre-filled with the decision's original estimate when it had one (rounded, shown as a placeholder like "Estimated: $12,000" if you clear the field), or left blank with a plain "Optional" placeholder when there was no estimate to start from. It reads "per year" beside the input to match how Verinode frames recurring value elsewhere. Adjust it to whatever you actually captured, higher, lower, or zero. Only non-negative numbers are accepted; anything above $100M is capped for sanity.
8. 8Was this plan useful? (or Was this recommendation useful? on the Mark as handled path), required, 1 to 5 stars. As you hover or click, a label confirms your pick: 1 = Not useful, 2 = Weak, 3 = OK, 4 = Useful, 5 = Nailed it.
9. 9What worked?, What didn't?, and What would you do differently?, three optional short-answer boxes for anything worth remembering in your own words.

Press Escape at any point to back out (unless the form is mid-submit), or use Cancel in the footer. The submit button always reads Close project, regardless of which path opened the dialog. If something goes wrong server-side, the error appears inline above the buttons and nothing is lost, fix it and try again.

Only the reason and the star rating are required. Everything else, the dollar figure and the three text boxes, is there because a fuller record helps later, not because Verinode needs it to close the loop.

What closing actually does

Submitting the dialog resolves the decision: its status flips to Resolved, it drops off the active Action Plans buckets, and your rating and reason are attached to it permanently. A resolved decision cannot be reopened or re-closed, so treat the dialog as final once you press Close project.

Your rating and outcome feed two things. First, your own record: Verinode remembers what worked and what didn't for you specifically, so recommendations get sharper over the time you use the platform. Second, the anonymized network layer: your outcome contributes, alongside every other operator's, to Verinode's read on which plans actually pay off across the industry, without ever exposing your identity or your numbers to anyone else. That is the same independent-data-trust boundary that governs every benchmark on the platform, see how benchmarks work for how contributions turn into peer intelligence elsewhere.

If you logged an actual dollar figure, Verinode also compares it against the original estimate behind the scenes. That comparison is part of what calibrates future estimates for you, it is not shown as a score anywhere in the product.

Empty states

If you have never started a plan, the Action Plans Gantt shows:

No active plans yet Your timeline is the board. Start a plan on any decision and its bar lands here. One row per plan, copper fill showing how far you've gotten, step checkpoints on top. Hover a step for details; click to open the workspace.

There is nothing to close until there is a plan running, this page fills in as you act on decisions in the feed or the decision workspace.

Related reading

• The decision workspace
• Acting on decisions
• The feed
• How benchmarks work