The cost profile behind your margin

What the cost profile is

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 percentage, material markup, and typical hours per job type. When a job has no real cost record extracted from your documents, Verinode falls back to these numbers to estimate its cost, and therefore its margin. That is why this one screen quietly drives the labor, overhead, and margin figures you see across the Margin section and on individual jobs.

Setting it is not a substitute for real cost data. As invoices, estimates, and P&L documents flow in, Verinode reads the actual costs off them and those take priority. The cost profile is the floor: it keeps your margin numbers grounded on jobs where the real figures have not yet arrived, instead of leaving them blank.

Your cost profile is yours. It is stored against your operator profile and used only to model your own jobs. It is never shared with peers and never sold to carriers.

Where to find it

The cost profile lives at iq.verinode.ai/margin/cost-profile. You do not reach it from the main settings list; you reach it from Margin, because Margin is where the number it drives shows up.

Open Margin from the sidebar and find the Cost Ratios · How Your Stack Lands panel. If you have not set your profile yet, that panel reads:

Industry-Default Ratios In Use Until You Configure Your Cost Profile.

with a copper link beneath it labeled Set up your cost profile →. Once your profile is saved, the same line changes to Your Configured Ratios vs Peer Median. Bars Below Peer Are Green; Above Are Red, and the link becomes Edit cost profile →. Either link takes you to the cost-profile page. The header shows Cost profile with a back arrow to Margin.

The fields you set

The page is one form, grouped into three sections, with a single Save Cost Profile button at the bottom. Every field is optional and starts empty, but the estimates only switch on once labor rate and crew size are both filled (see What setting it unlocks below). While the page loads you will see Loading cost profile….

Labor & Crew

This section carries the caption Default assumptions for margin estimates when per-job costs are not available (shown as ~estimated in job views). That is the whole point of the profile in one line.

• Labor Rate ($/hr), your loaded hourly cost for a crew member, entered as a dollar amount (the field placeholder shows e.g. 35.00). This should be your fully burdened rate, not the raw wage: it needs to include payroll taxes, insurance, and benefits, because that is what actually leaves the business per hour worked. If you enter the bare wage, every labor estimate will read low. For the difference between wage and burdened cost, and how to calculate it, see labor burden.
• Average Crew Size, the typical number of people on a job (placeholder e.g. 3). Verinode multiplies this by the labor rate and the hours for the job's category to estimate labor cost, so a crew of three at $35/hr is modeled at $105 of labor per hour on site.

Overhead & Materials

Both fields here are percentages applied to a job's revenue, not to its cost.

• Overhead %, your fixed operating cost as a share of job revenue (helper text: Applied as % of job revenue, placeholder e.g. 10). This is the slice of every dollar of revenue that goes to running the business, rent, admin, vehicles, software, rather than to the job itself. If you do not set it, estimates fall back to 10%.
• Material Markup %, the share of job revenue Verinode models as material cost (helper text: Applied as % of job revenue, placeholder e.g. 15). If you leave it blank, estimates fall back to 15%.

Average Hours per Job Category

Here you set the typical labor hours for a job of each type. There are six rows, each taking a number of hours (placeholder hrs):

• Water
• Fire
• Mold
• Storm
• Reconstruction
• Contents

Verinode picks the hours for a job based on its category, multiplies by your crew size and labor rate, and that becomes the estimated labor cost. A water job set to 40 hours with a crew of three at $35/hr models as 40 × 3 × $35 = $4,200 of labor. If a job's category has no hours set, Verinode uses your Water figure, and if that is also blank it uses a fallback of 40 hours. Set the categories you actually run so the estimate reflects your mix, a contents job and a full reconstruction should not carry the same hours.

How to fill it in

1. 1Open Margin and click Set up your cost profile → in the Cost Ratios panel.
2. 2Under Labor & Crew, enter your fully burdened Labor Rate ($/hr) and your Average Crew Size. These two are what turn estimates on.
3. 3Under Overhead & Materials, set your Overhead % and Material Markup % as whole-number percentages of revenue.
4. 4Under Average Hours per Job Category, fill the hours for each restoration type you run. At minimum set Water, since it is the fallback for any unlabeled job.
5. 5Click Save Cost Profile. The button reads Saving… while it works and you will see the confirmation Cost profile saved.

What setting it unlocks

Two things change once the profile is saved.

First, estimated job costs turn on. Verinode only produces an estimate for a job when both Labor Rate ($/hr) and Average Crew Size are set, with either one missing, jobs that have no real extracted cost show no cost and no modeled margin. Once both are set, those jobs get an estimated cost built from labor (rate × crew × category hours), materials (markup % × revenue), and overhead (overhead % × revenue). These appear marked with a ~ as ~estimated in job views, so you can always tell a modeled figure from an actual one. Revenue for the calculation is taken from the best figure the job has, in order: collected, then billed, then approved, then estimated amount.

Second, the Cost Ratios panel on Margin switches from industry defaults to your own numbers. Before you configure the profile, that panel benchmarks industry-default ratios against your peer median. After you save, it compares your configured labor, materials, and overhead ratios against the peer median, bars that land below the peer median show green, bars above show red, so you can see at a glance where your cost stack sits against the cohort.

To read the margin numbers this feeds, start with understanding your margin. To turn the gaps this exposes into concrete goals, see setting cost targets.

A note on accuracy

The profile is a model, not a measurement. It is there to keep your margin grounded on jobs where the real costs have not landed yet, the more real invoices, estimates, and P&L documents flow in, the less Verinode leans on it, because actual extracted costs always take priority over the estimate. Revisit these numbers when your wages, crew structure, or overhead shift, so the fallback stays honest. Net margin is what you keep after all of this, labor, materials, and overhead, so a cost profile that runs light quietly overstates the very number you are trying to protect.

Data sources