The Benchmarks data room

What the Benchmarks section is

Benchmarks is the data room where Verinode turns the numbers already sitting in your invoices, payroll, financials, and inbox into a read on the whole restoration market, with your own position marked against it. It is built to feel like a market terminal: the industry's operating distributions on the left, your line running through them, and the counterparties, materials, and ratings that move those numbers all one tab away.

Everything in this section comes from the same place: operators contributing data that Verinode anonymizes and pools. That is what makes every tab here answer one question, where do I stand. The published side of the picture, macro series, analyst reports, and industry press, lives in its own section next door, Industry Data.

Verinode is an independent data trust, not a job-management tool and not a carrier product. The benchmarks here are drawn from anonymized operator contributions and are never sold to carriers. That independence is exactly what makes them worth trusting when you price a job, question a vendor, or size up a carrier. Verinode reads the data and shows you where you stand. It never decides for you.

This article is the map. Each tab and concept it names has its own deep-dive article, cross-linked below, so this stays a tour of the room rather than a manual for every instrument in it.

Where to find it

Open Benchmarks from the sidebar under Intelligence, at iq.verinode.ai/benchmarks. The page opens with a sticky uppercase Benchmarks title and a glass capsule tab bar directly beneath it. On a narrow screen the tab bar scrolls sideways rather than wrapping.

Along the very bottom of the page, pinned as you scroll, a slow-crawling ticker runs the market's headline metric medians, the same "the market is moving" feel a trading terminal has. It is chrome, not a control; the real work happens in the tabs.

The five tabs

The tab bar carries five tabs, always in this order: Benchmarks, Carriers & TPAs, Materials, Vendor Intelligence, and Equipment Intelligence. Here is what each one is for.

1. Benchmarks

"The industry's operating distributions, with your position marked. Hide it to read the market clean."

This is the home tab and the heart of the room: the industry's operating distributions across profitability, cash velocity, cost structure, service speed, safety, fleet, reputation, and more, laid out category by category. Each row is one metric you can scan in a couple of seconds: the peer distribution runs as a band with the median marked, and your own value rides on the same axis as a colored marker, so "where you stand" reads at a glance. Two display controls sit in the top-right: a Cards / Table switch for how the metrics are laid out, and the Show my position toggle described below. A secondary strip underneath carries the scope and cohort controls. For how to read a single row, the distribution band, and the drill-in, see reading a benchmark; for the full catalog of categories and what each metric means, see benchmark categories.

2. Carriers & TPAs

"How every counterparty approves, pushes back, and pays across the network. Tap any name for your line vs peers."

A league table of the carriers and third-party administrators you and the network work with: how each one approves work, where they push back, and how fast they pay. Tap any name to open its card and see your own line against the peer read for that counterparty. When enabled, a Program Rates panel sits below the league table showing the rate terms you have accepted per program against the anonymized peer cohort. See carriers and TPAs benchmarks.

3. Materials

"The market's per-unit material prices, grouped by type, with your own price marked. Hide it to read the market clean."

The market's per-unit material prices, pulled from anonymized invoice lines and grouped into collapsible families (so it is a scannable list of families, not one flat wall of items). Your own median price per unit is marked against each, impact-ranked so the materials where a price gap costs you the most float to the top. A separate published market reference price shows for context and is never mixed into the peer median. See materials benchmarks.

4. Vendor Intelligence

"What the network knows about the software, services, and processes you run. Peer reviews and the Verinode Research Score on each."

Everything the network has learned about the tools you run and the ways you run them: the anonymized peer rating other operators have given each one, and the Verinode Research Score derived from Verinode's own research, with the reasoning behind each dimension. It also carries stack gaps, the categories where operators who have a vendor outperform operators who do not. Software, Services, and Processes each get their own tile. See vendor and equipment intelligence.

5. Equipment Intelligence

"What the network knows about the gear you buy. Peer reviews and the Verinode Research Score on each make and model."

The same two reads applied to physical equipment: air movers, dehumidifiers, HEPA units, generators, sliced by equipment class. Until peer satisfaction ratings accumulate it shows the full research catalog, so you can browse the field before the network has weighed in on all of it.

What moved to Industry Data

Until August 2026 this section also carried the published macro series, the Verinode Research library, and the industry news feed. Those three now live in their own section, Industry Data, directly under Benchmarks in the sidebar.

The split is by where the numbers come from. Benchmarks is what the network knows because operators contribute it, so it is anonymized, peer-gated, and about your position. Industry Data is what someone else already published, so it is public, source-attributed, and readable in full whatever tier you are on. Old links still work: ?tab=industry, ?tab=library, and ?tab=news redirect to the matching tab in the new section. See the Industry Data section.

Scope: whose market you are comparing against

The Benchmarks tab carries a scope picker, in the control strip over the metric list, with up to three settings:

• National, the whole operator network. Always available.
• Regional, operators in your state. Available once your state is on your profile.
• Group, a specific network, franchise, or association you belong to. Each network you are affiliated with shows as its own scope button.

Scope answers "compared to whom?" Picking Regional or a Group re-resolves every distribution against that narrower cohort. If you pick a scope Verinode cannot resolve (no state on file, no group affiliation), it falls back to the default rather than showing you an empty page.

Alongside scope sits the cohort filter, which narrows by the kind of work rather than the geography: by job type (water, fire, mold, and so on), by property type (commercial or residential), or by "similar shape", operators whose overall health profile looks like yours. Scope and cohort compose, so you can read, for example, commercial fire work among operators in your state. The full taxonomy and the mechanics behind each axis live in benchmark cohorts and scope.

Show my position: read the market clean

Both the Benchmarks and Materials tab subtitles end with the same line: "Hide it to read the market clean." That refers to the Show my position toggle in the tab's top-right controls.

By default the tab is data-first: the distributions are the subject, and your own value rides along as an overlay (a marker on the axis, your number, and the gap to the median). Turn the overlay off and your own line drops away, leaving the pure market distribution, no "you" on the chart. It is useful when you want to study the shape of the market itself without your own position pulling your eye, then flip it back on to see where you land.

On the HQ (network) surface there is no single "you" to overlay, since the distribution is your own offices spread out, so the toggle and the operator scope picker do not appear there.

What Contributors see, and why some numbers are blurred

Peer benchmarks are the scarce, valuable core of this room, so access to them is earned by contribution, not simply by opening the page. Everyone sees every tab in full layout. What differs is the peer numbers behind them:

• Contribute your data to a family of metrics, or hold a paid membership, and the peer reads in that family unlock.
• Where you have not yet contributed, a peer figure may show as a teaser (a curated headline) or stay locked and blurred, with a clear path to unlock it.

This is deliberate. Every anonymized contribution you make returns something tangible, and gating keeps the benchmarks scarce enough to stay a real moat, one that carriers never get to buy. The full rules on what unlocks what, and how the teaser and locked states behave, are in benchmark access and gating.

Reading it honestly

Two habits keep this room trustworthy to work from. First, mind the confidence behind a number: a distribution standing on twenty operators deserves more weight than one standing on five, and Verinode marks that difference rather than hiding it. See confidence and trust. Second, remember what the benchmarks are and are not: they are anonymized, aggregated, peer-contributed reference data, never a leak of any one operator's figures, and never sold to carriers. How the whole pipeline is built, from your data to an anonymized distribution, is walked through in how benchmarks work.

Getting the most from it

1. 1Open Benchmarks from the sidebar under Intelligence and let the home tab load the market distributions.
2. 2Set scope (National, Regional, or a Group) and a cohort filter to frame the fairest comparison for your question.
3. 3Toggle Show my position on to see where you land, off to study the market shape clean.
4. 4Scan the categories for the widest gaps, then tap a row to drill into it, see reading a benchmark.
5. 5Move across the tabs as the question demands: a slow carrier to Carriers & TPAs, a pricey material to Materials, a tool you are weighing to Vendor Intelligence, a piece of gear to Equipment Intelligence.
6. 6Where a peer number is blurred, contribute the matching data or upgrade to unlock it, see benchmark access and gating.
7. 7For what the wider market is doing rather than where you sit in it, step next door to Industry Data.

Data sources