Your cost profile

What your cost profile is

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 that went into it usually live in a supervisor's head or a spreadsheet nobody updates. Your cost profile is the one place you tell Verinode what a typical job costs to run, in your business, with your crew, at your rates. Verinode uses those numbers to build a cost estimate for any job where it doesn't have an actual, itemized cost on file.

This is math, not judgment. Verinode does not decide what your labor rate should be or how much overhead to carry. It takes the five numbers you enter, applies the same formula to every job that needs an estimate, and labels the result as an estimate so you always know whether a margin figure is real or modeled. You set the assumptions; Verinode does the arithmetic.

Where to find it

Cost profile lives under Margin in the sidebar, since it is the cost model that every margin calculation on that page draws from. Two ways in:

• Open Margin, then follow the Set up your cost profile (or Edit cost profile) link on the Cost Ratios panel of the Cost Structure view.
• Go directly to iq.verinode.ai/margin/cost-profile.

The three groups on the form

The page is one form, split into three labeled groups, with a single Save Cost Profile button at the bottom.

Labor & Crew

The group caption reads: "Default assumptions for margin estimates when per-job costs are not available (shown as ~estimated in job views)." That line is the whole point of the page: these are fallback assumptions, used only when Verinode doesn't already have real costs for a job.

• Labor Rate ($/hr). Your blended hourly labor cost, what an hour of crew time actually costs you once wages, taxes, and benefits are folded in. Example placeholder shown: "e.g. 35.00."
• Average Crew Size. How many people you typically send on a job. Example placeholder shown: "e.g. 3."

Overhead & Materials

Two percentage fields, each applied as a percent of the job's revenue rather than a flat dollar amount, so the estimate scales with job size:

• Overhead %, helper text: "Applied as % of job revenue." Example placeholder: "e.g. 10."
• Material Markup %, helper text: "Applied as % of job revenue." Example placeholder: "e.g. 15."

Average Hours per Job Category

One row per job type, each expecting a whole number of hours: Water, Fire, Mold, Storm, Reconstruction, Contents. This is where the crew-size and labor-rate assumptions above turn into an actual labor cost, because different job types take different amounts of crew time. A water job that wraps in a day and a fire job that runs for weeks shouldn't use the same hours figure, so you set one per category.

How these five numbers become a cost estimate

Verinode only reaches for your cost profile when a job doesn't already have real, itemized costs recorded against it (from an import or a manual entry). When it does reach for it, the calculation is fixed and the same for every job:

1. 1Find the job's revenue. Verinode uses whichever dollar figure is furthest along the billing lifecycle: the collected amount if the carrier has paid, otherwise the billed amount, otherwise the approved amount, otherwise the original Estimated amount on the job.
2. 2Find the hours for that job's category. Verinode looks up the hours you set for the job's category (Water, Fire, Mold, Storm, Reconstruction, or Contents). If that category's row is blank, it falls back to your Water hours, and if that's blank too, it falls back to 40 hours.
3. 3Calculate labor cost. Labor Rate × Average Crew Size × the hours from step 2.
4. 4Calculate material cost. The job's revenue × your Material Markup % (or 15% if you haven't set one).
5. 5Calculate overhead cost. The job's revenue × your Overhead % (or 10% if you haven't set one).
6. 6Add them up. Labor + materials + overhead is the total estimated cost, which Verinode shows as ~estimated wherever it appears in a job view, so it's never mistaken for an actual, imported figure.

Saving your cost profile

Save Cost Profile writes all five fields at once, it replaces your saved cost profile in full rather than updating one field at a time, so a blank field really does mean blank, not "leave as previously set." While the save is in flight the button reads "Saving…" On success, a confirmation reads "Cost profile saved." right under the button. If the save fails, the error message from the server appears in the same spot instead, in red, so you know to try again.

Empty states

• While the page is loading, it shows a single line: "Loading cost profile…"
• The first time you open it, every field is blank. There's no separate "no data yet" banner, the empty inputs and their gray example placeholders (e.g. 35.00, e.g. 3, e.g. 10, e.g. 15, hrs) are the empty state. Nothing is estimated for any job until you fill in at least Labor Rate and Average Crew Size and save.
• Job views with no cost profile set and no actual costs on file simply don't get an estimated cost figure. Verinode never invents a number when it has nothing to build one from.

Best-practice example

Say you run 3-person crews at a blended $38/hr, carry 12% overhead, and mark up materials 18%. You set Water at 24 hours, Fire at 80 hours, and leave Mold, Storm, Reconstruction, and Contents blank for now. A water job with no imported costs, billed at $9,000, gets estimated as: labor = $38 × 3 × 24 hours = $2,736; materials = $9,000 × 18% = $1,620; overhead = $9,000 × 12% = $1,080; total estimated cost = $5,436. A mold job on the same account, with no hours set for Mold, falls back to the Water hours (24) for its labor calculation, since that's the nearest assumption you've actually given Verinode. As soon as an actual cost comes in for a job, whether imported or entered by hand, that real figure replaces the estimate for that job specifically, the cost profile only fills the gap where real numbers don't exist yet.

For how this estimate fits into the rest of your margin picture, see Understanding your margin. For how actual costs and financial documents make their way into Verinode in the first place, see Connecting your data and Forwarding documents.