Handing a Flow to a data contributor

What this article covers

Setting up Flow for a tool walks through the whole configuration form: cadence, reminder channels, the export steps. This article zooms in on one part of that form, the Who pulls it step, and answers the three questions that actually matter when you hand a tool's data pull to someone else: how do you pick or invite the person, what can they see once they have a login, and how do reminders actually reach them from that point on.

The short version: a delegated Flow is never handed to "a name." It is handed to a real, separately-logged-in Verinode account with the data_contributor role. That is deliberate. Because the upload comes from their own login, Verinode can attribute it to them specifically, which is what keeps a data pipeline honest when more than one person feeds it.

Where to find it

Open Connect from the sidebar at iq.verinode.ai/connect. Under Your tools, tap any tool that has no direct API connection (Xactimate, your job-management system, an accounting desktop edition, and the like). Its Flow card opens, and Who pulls it is the second question on the setup form, right after How often.

Picking or inviting a data contributor

The Who pulls it control is a dropdown with three kinds of options:

1. 1"I'll handle it." The default. No delegation happens, you (the person configuring the Flow) own the pull yourself, and reminders come to you.
2. 2An existing data contributor. If your account already has one or more data_contributor accounts, they appear under an optgroup labeled Your data contributors. Pick a name and the form confirms exactly what happens next: "[Name] gets the export steps by email now, plus a reminder each time it's due."
3. 3"+ Add a new data contributor." Picking this opens an inline invite panel with a Full name field (placeholder "Full name (e.g. Maria Lopez)") and a Work email for the invite field. The panel spells out the deal in plain language: "This emails [name] an invite to create a free Verinode login. Once they accept, they can upload the data you ask for and it's tracked to them. They never see your numbers, benchmarks, or decisions." A line underneath adds: "Reminders start once they accept. Manage contributors any time in Settings."

Leave the email field blank and submit, and the form blocks it with "Enter the teammate's email." On the server side, an existing-contributor pick is also checked against your own roster: the assignee has to already be a data_contributor on your account, never a dangling ID or a login from somewhere else. If that check fails you'll see "Pick a data contributor on your team to hand this pull to."

Why the account, not just a name, matters

A Flow that is "assigned" is stored against that account's user ID, not a plain text name. That has two real consequences:

• Audit attribution. When a delegated contributor emails their export in, they send it to your one shared Verinode inbound address, the same address the whole team forwards to. Verinode does not tell them apart by a separate address per person, it tells them apart by the sender's own email address on file. Because their account's email matches what they send from, the upload is stamped as theirs, not lumped in as "unknown" and not silently credited to whoever set the Flow up.
• Auto-complete only fires for the right person. A Flow can roll its own due date forward the moment a matching upload lands, no one has to click anything. But that only happens when the upload's sender is the exact person the Flow is assigned to (or you, for a Flow you kept for yourself). Handing a Flow to the wrong contributor, or to yourself when the actual work happens on someone else's desk, means that convenience never kicks in for that tool, even though the reminders still fire. See Setting up Flow for a tool for the full auto-complete mechanics.

Until an invited contributor accepts, none of this can work yet, there's no account to attribute to. The card reflects that honestly: the status dot turns yellow and the line reads "Flow is on, invite pending" instead of the green "Flow is on." The detail line adds "(invited)" next to their name until they accept.

What the invitee can and cannot see

This is the part worth being precise about, because it's the reason delegating a Flow is safe to do widely. A data_contributor login is scoped down to almost nothing beyond the job of feeding data in.

What they can do:

• Forward emails and upload documents.
• See their own ingestion, the uploads and forwards they personally sent in.
• See the jobs assigned to them.

What they cannot do, or see, at all:

• Financials, margin, or cost data.
• Benchmarks or any peer comparison.
• The Feed, Decisions, or signals of any kind.
• The dashboard, or IQ chat.
• Clients, vendors, process, settings, billing, or other members. They cannot invite anyone themselves, and they cannot manage the team.

In plain terms: a data contributor account can put data in and see what they put in. They cannot look at your numbers, your standing against peers, or anything IQ has concluded from the data. That boundary exists for exactly the delegation this article is about, so an operator can hand off the busywork of pulling a tool's export without handing off anything the paid memberships on the account are there to protect.

Because a contributor's login has no reason to open Connect, the feed, or a decision workspace, expect the relationship to be entirely email-driven from their side: they get the steps, they reply with the file or forward it to your address, and that's the whole interaction. You're the one who watches the card, the notifications, and the Vault link ("See what's come in from [tool] in your Vault") to confirm what actually arrived.

How reminders reach them

The first email goes out the moment you save. As soon as you assign an existing contributor and click Set up Flow, Verinode sends them a note with the tool's export steps as a short checklist, your shared forwarding address, and the due date. It reads, in effect: "[Company] uses Verinode to benchmark the business against peers, and asked me to collect [tool]'s data. Could you help get it in?", plus a line noting how long it takes and how often ("about a minute, monthly"). It closes with "Email the export to [address], or just reply to this note with the file attached. Verinode reads it automatically and marks this done, so you never have to log in and check a box." If you (the person who set it up) have an email on file, the note adds "Questions? [your email]." so they have someone real to ask.

If you invited a brand-new contributor instead, that person gets the standard account invite first, the free data_contributor signup. The Flow reminder above only starts once they accept and their login exists, exactly as the invite panel warns you.

After that, reminders are automatic and they back off, not pile up. Once a Flow's due date arrives, a scheduled check looks for anything overdue and, if Email is one of the contributor's reminder channels, sends the same style of note again, reworded for a fresh reminder or for one that's now overdue. The cadence is deliberately calm:

• Right around the due date, a nudge goes out every few days at most, it never fires daily.
• The longer a pull sits overdue, the less often the nudge repeats (roughly weekly), so a stuck pull escalates in tone without turning into noise.
• If a pull stays open long enough, Verinode sends one final "this needs attention" note, and then it stops emailing the contributor about that cycle entirely. At that point the ball is back in your court.

You get your own notifications the whole time, separate from what the contributor receives:

• The moment you delegate: "[Tool] data assigned to [name]", or, for a fresh invite, "Invited [name] to pull [tool] data."
• On the routine due date: "[Tool] data is due," or "[Tool] data is Nd overdue" once it slips.
• If the person you invited still hasn't accepted by the time the pull is due: "[Tool] pull is waiting on an invite," nudging you to resend it, reassign the Flow, or pull the data in yourself.
• If it's gone quiet on the contributor's side for a while: "[Tool] data still isn't in (Nd)", the same escalation point where Verinode stops emailing them and hands the situation to you.

Calendar reminders are a separate, narrower option. They only appear as a channel for tools with no automatic export path, a manual-tier pull with no API and no auto-forward. Turning on Calendar adds a link, "Add the reminders to your calendar," that subscribes to an .ics feed of that tool's recurring due dates. It has nothing to do with the contributor's email reminders and is meant for whoever is actually doing the manual pull, so it shows up for a tool that already flows through Connect or an inbox auto-forward, since nagging someone to do by hand what the pipe already does isn't useful.

Marking a cycle done stops that cycle's reminders immediately, whether it happens because you clicked I pulled it or because a matching upload from the right contributor rolled it forward on its own. Either way the due date advances to the next cadence and the reminder clock resets clean, no half-sent nudge for a cycle that's already closed.

Managing contributors over time

A contributor you've invited or delegated to isn't locked in. From Settings, you can:

• Resend an invite that hasn't been accepted yet (this also extends its expiry by a week, so an old typo'd address doesn't waste the whole window).
• Cancel a pending invite outright.
• Turn on or off the two read-only grants described above (see all ingestion, see all jobs).
• Remove a contributor's access entirely. Doing so also closes out their email-forwarding entitlement, so a departed contributor's old inbound address stops accepting new documents.

None of this needs to happen from the Flow card itself, and reassigning a tool to someone else afterward is just reopening Change on that tool and picking a different name.

Empty states

• No data contributors yet. The Who pulls it dropdown simply skips the "Your data contributors" optgroup and shows only "I'll handle it" and "+ Add a new data contributor." This isn't a broken list, it just means nobody has been invited into that role yet.
• Invite still pending. The card reads "Flow is on, invite pending" with a yellow dot rather than green, and the detail line appends "(invited)" next to the name. This resolves itself the moment the invitee accepts, no action needed on your end beyond patience or a resend.

Best-practice example

Say your office runs a job-management system with no direct API. You set its Flow to Weekly, and instead of pulling it yourself, you delegate it to your office manager, inviting her as a new data contributor with her work email. She gets the invite, creates her free login, and from then on gets the weekly export-steps email at her own address. She replies with the file each week; because her sender address matches her account, every upload lands attributed to her, and because it reads as job data, the Flow rolls itself forward without either of you clicking anything. She never sees your margin numbers, your benchmarks, or a single decision Verinode has surfaced, her whole relationship with the platform is that one weekly email and her own upload history. If she goes on vacation and a week slips, you get the overdue notification, not her inbox blowing up daily, and you decide whether to nudge her, pull it in yourself, or hand it to someone else for that cycle.

Related articles

• Setting up Flow for a tool
• How Connect and Flow work: the sources model
• The Your Tools tab
• Forwarding documents

Data sources