Margin, cost & materials
Understand your margin, cost ratios, and material pricing against your peers.
59 articles · IQ
Understanding your margin
How Verinode reads your margin, why it leads with net income, and how to see what is moving it.
Material costs and pricing
See what you pay for materials against peers and catch pricing that is drifting above the market.
Cost ratios and labor burden
Break your costs into labor, materials, and subs, and understand why burden matters more than wage rate.
Invoices and cash flow
Track outstanding invoices and see which accounts tie up your cash the longest.
Setting cost targets
Set the margin and cost bars you want to hit, and track each one against your actuals and the peer median.
"Costs: now part of Margin"
If you have `/costs` bookmarked, saved in a browser tab, or linked from an old notification, it still works, it just doesn't stop there anymore. Open it and Verinode sends you straight to **Margin*…
Adding an Invoice: The Add Data Button
Verinode does not have a separate "create invoice" form. There is one universal capture point for every kind of business document, including invoices, and it lives behind a single button labeled **…
Biggest Gaps
Biggest Gaps is the last of the five aspects inside the Materials section, and the one built to answer a single question with no interpretation required: of everything you buy, which materials are…
Cash flow and cash runway
Margin is the health of a job. Cash flow is the health of the week. A restoration business can be profitable on paper and still run short of cash, because the money you have earned is sitting in re…
Confidence dots and trust levels
Every headline figure on the Margin page answers a second, quieter question alongside the number itself: should you trust this enough to act on it? A margin built from a current-year P&L and a thic…
Confirming a Currency Conversion
Verinode's dollar figures, margin, benchmarks, cash flow, everything, are read and displayed in US dollars. Most invoices, renewal notices, and estimates that flow into your Vault already come in t…
Emailing Invoices to Your IQ Address
Every operator gets one dedicated inbound address for IQ. Forward vendor invoices, carrier and TPA statements, renewal notices, and price-change emails to it, and IQ reads them the same way it read…
Failed Uploads: Retry or Discard
Every document you hand Verinode (an upload, a forwarded email, a bulk import, a photo) goes into a processing queue. IQ reads it, extracts the data, and files it into the right place: an invoice,…
Fixing a Misfiled Invoice (Entity Correction)
Every invoice, certificate, estimate, or email you send into Verinode gets read and matched to something: a vendor, a carrier, or a job. Most of the time the match is obvious, the vendor name on th…
How material prices get tracked
Materials is where Verinode reads what you actually pay for restoration materials, drywall, paint, fasteners, lumber, insulation, and the rest, and compares it to what operators like you pay. Befor…
Job-level cost breakdowns
Every job carries one cost record underneath it: labor, material, equipment, subcontractor, overhead, and other. Those six numbers add up to a job's Total Cost, and Total Cost against what the job…
Leakage, the three gaps
Leakage is money you earned but never collected. The **Leakage** tile on the Margin page puts one number on it, and behind that number Verinode follows every job through four stages, what you estim…
Linking a material to a supplier
Every price Verinode shows you for a material, drywall mud, OSB, plastic sheeting, whatever you buy, has to be tied to the supplier you bought it from before a per-supplier comparison means anythin…
Margin by job type
Margin by Job Type answers a question the headline margin cannot: *which kinds of work actually pay off once you load in their real costs?* A shop can run a healthy blended margin while quietly los…
Market Context
Market Context is the fourth of five aspects inside the Materials section. It answers a narrower question than the other four: not "what do operators like you pay," but "what does a published, publ…
Materials before you have data
Materials is a benchmark section, not a lifecycle tracker: the question it answers is what you pay per unit for the materials you buy, drywall, paint, fasteners, lumber, insulation, roofing and ext…
Materials on mobile
Materials is where Verinode reads what you pay per unit for the things your crews buy (drywall, paint, fasteners, lumber, insulation, roofing goods, PPE, and the rest) and puts that price next to w…
Most Recent material purchases
Most Recent is the bottom row on the Materials home page. It is the one place in Materials that shows your raw invoice activity exactly as it landed, one tile per material line item, rather than a…
Price vs Peers
Price vs Peers is the first of five aspects inside the Materials section. It answers one question, material by material: for each thing you buy from a supplier, what do you pay per unit, and where…
Reading an Extraction Receipt
Every invoice, certificate, estimate, scorecard, or other file that flows into Verinode gets read by the extraction pipeline: it classifies the document, matches it to the right vendor, client, car…
Reading the Materials hero panel
Every material line you buy, drywall, paint, lumber, fasteners, insulation, roofing and exterior goods, floor coverings, tile and masonry, site protection, cleaning chemicals, restoration consumabl…
Setting cost and margin targets
Cost Targets is a small configuration deck where you set the numbers you are aiming for: your target gross margin, your target net margin (what you keep, after everything), and the cost ratios you…
Spend Mix
Spend Mix is the third of five aspects inside the Materials section. It answers a different question from the other four: not what you pay per unit, and not who is cheapest, but where your money ac…
Supplements and supplement chains
A supplement is a request to a carrier or adjuster to approve additional scope or additional pay on a claim after the original estimate. On restoration jobs, hidden damage, changed conditions, and…
The Adjusters view and scorecards
The Adjusters view turns the supplements you negotiate into a per-adjuster read: who approves, who stalls, and where money is being left on the table. Verinode builds a scorecard for every adjuster…
The Benchmarks view on Margin
The Benchmarks tab on the Margin page answers one question: where do your margin numbers stand against operators like you? It is a focused slice of the full [Benchmarks hub](/help/how-benchmarks-wo…
The Carriers view
The **Carriers** tab on the Margin page is a league table of every carrier, TPA, and private client in your book, ranked by revenue. It answers one question: where is each payer helping or hurting…
The cost profile behind your margin
The cost profile is the small set of assumptions Verinode uses to estimate what a job costs you when the actual costs have not flowed in yet. It holds your default labor rate, crew size, overhead p…
The Cost Structure view
The Cost Structure view is where you go behind the headline margin number to see *why* it lands where it does. It answers two questions: does your reported margin match what you can actually price…
The Explore row and the five material aspects
Materials is a benchmark-first section: what you pay per unit for the materials you buy, set against what operators like you pay, ranked by the yearly dollars at stake. It is not a lifecycle tracke…
The Explore Row: Vault Tiles
The Vault is where every document you send Verinode lands: invoices, certificates, estimates, carrier emails, statements, job exports, and anything else you forward, upload, or paste in. Verinode r…
The Findings view
The Findings view is the full list of everything Verinode has caught eating into your margin. You open it from the **Leakage** tile on the Margin page, or from the **Findings** tab. Where the Margi…
The Labor Burden view
Labor is usually the largest and least understood cost on a job. The wage on someone's offer letter is only part of what an hour of their time actually costs you. The Labor Burden view answers the…
The Lists Tab: Playlist, Reading, and Saved
As you work through [the feed](/help/the-feed), you will run into videos, articles, podcasts, and industry news you do not want to act on right now but do not want to lose either. The Lists tab is…
The Margin first-visit reveal
Margin is switched on from day one, so its [first-visit intro](/help/section-onboarding-first-visit) is usually the first onboarding screen a new operator meets, and its start step is the platform'…
The Margin page on mobile
The Margin page on the mobile app carries the same numbers as the web page, restructured for a phone. The web page anchors everything on a fixed hero band with side-by-side gauges, a full-width hea…
The Materials section
Materials is a benchmark-first view of one question: what do you pay per unit for the materials you buy, against what operators like you pay for the same thing? It is not a purchase-order tool and…
The Materials Take Action row
Materials is a benchmark section, not a lifecycle section: it exists to answer one question, what do you pay per unit for the materials you buy, against what operators like you pay. Two rows under…
The Notifications Tab: Your Alert Inbox
The Notifications tab is the full history of every alert Verinode has sent you, not just the handful the bell icon shows right now. Verinode raises a notification whenever something happens that is…
The Pricing view, cross-carrier rates
The **Pricing** tab on the Margin page is your private, cross-carrier comparison of the same line item's unit price across different carriers. When Liberty pays your dehumidifier rental at one rate…
The restoration chart of accounts, and how to set yours up
QuickBooks and Xero ship with a generic chart of accounts. Neither knows what a restoration job is, so neither enforces where a drying tech's wages belong. Your bookkeeper makes a reasonable call,…
The Review Queue: Confirming Uncertain Documents
Every document you send into Verinode, an emailed invoice, a forwarded scorecard, a photo from a job site, a bulk export, gets read automatically and filed against the right vendor, carrier, TPA, c…
The Tracking Tab: What Verinode Knows Per Entity
Every document that flows into Verinode, an invoice, a certificate of insurance, a job export, a scorecard, gets attached to one thing: a vendor, a client (which in this rollup also covers carriers…
The Uploads Tab: Your Document Table
Every invoice, certificate, estimate, scorecard, or email attachment that flows into Verinode lands as one row in a single table: the Uploads tab. It is the ledger behind everything else Verinode t…
The Vault on Mobile
The Vault is where every document Verinode has on file for your business lives: invoices, estimates, contracts, adjuster correspondence, whatever you have forwarded or connected in. On the web app…
Understanding your Operator Health score
The Operator Health score is the single "how am I doing" number for your business. It rolls the signals Verinode already reads from your data into one figure on a familiar scale, **580 to 820**, th…
Unlocking peer material prices
Open **Materials** from the sidebar at `iq.verinode.ai/materials`. This is where Verinode reads your supplier invoices and shows what you actually pay per unit for drywall, paint, fasteners, lumber…
What Verinode Is Tracking (Vault Hero)
The Vault hero is the status band at the top of your Vault: one large number for how many documents Verinode has captured, a color-coded completeness pill beside it, a line of context underneath, a…
Where Invoices Live: The Vault
If you have a bookmark for `/invoices`, it still works, it just does not stop where it used to. Open it and Verinode redirects you straight through to `/documents`, which itself redirects to `/data…
Who sees what on Margin
Most of the Margin page is the same for everyone on your account. One part is not: **adjuster scorecards** are held tighter than the rest of the page. This article explains the roles Verinode recog…
Your cost profile
Most restoration jobs don't come with a clean cost breakdown attached. You know what a job billed for, and eventually what it collected, but the labor hours, the material spend, and the overhead th…
Your Suppliers
Your Suppliers is one of the five analytical tabs inside the Materials aspect deck. Where [Price vs Peers](/help/materials-overview) asks "is my price high or low against operators like you," Your…
Your true gross margin, reported vs normalized
The gross margin printed on your P&L is only as honest as the accounts behind it. In restoration, the single most common bookkeeping habit quietly distorts that number: field labor, job vehicles, a…
Your Vault Key: How Invoice Data Is Encrypted
Every invoice you forward, upload, or connect into Verinode lands in your Vault, the page at `iq.verinode.ai/data` (sidebar: **My Data**, sub-item **Vault**; the browser tab reads "Vault"). At the…