"Costs: now part of Margin"

What happened to Costs

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 (iq.verinode.ai/margin). Nothing you used to look at on Costs was deleted. It moved, because Costs and Margin were answering the same question from two different screens: what does a job actually cost, and what's left after that cost. Verinode now answers both in one place, next to the peer benchmarks that give a cost number meaning.

Costs is gone from the sidebar. Margin is the entry now, and it opens directly into the same cost data, benchmarked against your peers instead of sitting alone.

Where your cost data lives now

Everything Costs used to show has a home inside Margin's nine-tab card slider (Findings · Adjusters · Carriers · Pricing · Cost Structure · Margin by Type · Labor Burden · Cash Flow · Benchmarks), reached by tapping any tile on the Margin page, or directly on the Cost Structure tile in the Explore row.

• Cost ratios and your cost mix (labor, materials, subcontractors, equipment, overhead) live in the Cost Structure tab, compared bar-by-bar against your peer median. See the Cost Structure view for the full walkthrough.
• P&L periods (the revenue, cost, and margin figures from your uploaded financials) feed the Trend chart on the Margin home page and the gross-margin and net-margin numbers in the hero panel at the top. They also carry into the Benchmarks tab as your operator value.
• Category and vendor breakdowns show up two ways: the Peer Comparison By Category list underneath the Cost Structure panels (your cost bucket vs. the peer median, one row per category), and the Stack Spend tile in the Explore row, your total monthly vendor spend and vendor count. Line-item and Xactimate-level cost detail, comparing what different carriers pay for the same line, lives on the Pricing tab.
• Job-by-job cost detail (labor, materials, equipment, subcontractor, overhead, and other cost per job) is the data underneath all of the above. It reaches Verinode from the documents you forward or connect, invoices, cost reports, P&L exports, rather than from a standalone Costs entry screen, and rolls up into the cost ratios and margin figures described below.

Reading the numbers hasn't changed, they're the same figures the platform has always computed. What changed is that they now sit beside a peer median instead of standing alone, so a cost percentage has something to be measured against.

How cost ratios roll up

Every dollar of revenue you collect is modeled as flowing through five buckets: Labor, Materials, Subcontractors, Equipment, and Overhead. The Cost Structure tab's Cost Ratios · How Your Stack Lands panel shows each bucket as a horizontal bar, your value filled in, the peer median marked as a thin vertical line across it. A bar reads On Peer, or +X.Xpp vs Peer / -X.Xpp vs Peer, and turns green when you're at or below the peer median (a higher cost ratio is worse, so under the marker is the good direction) and red when you're above it.

Where those ratios come from is labeled, so you always know how solid a number is:

• From Your Data, computed from your actual invoiced job costs, the strongest source.
• Profile Estimate, computed from the labor rate, crew size, overhead percentage, and material markup you've entered in your cost profile.
• Industry Default, a restoration-sector composite standing in until you've configured a cost profile at all.

Until you set up a cost profile, the panel reads "Industry-Default Ratios In Use Until You Configure Your Cost Profile" with a link to Set up your cost profile. Once you've saved one, that same link becomes Edit cost profile, and the panel reads "Your Configured Ratios vs Peer Median." The cost profile itself, labor rate, crew size, overhead %, material markup %, and hours per job category, lives at /margin/cost-profile and is admin-only. See the cost profile behind your margin for every field.

How P&L periods roll up

A P&L period is one uploaded slice of your actual financials: a start and end date, a revenue figure, and a cost breakdown (labor, materials, equipment, subcontractor, total COGS, total overhead), with a gross margin and net margin percentage attached. Verinode reads these from whatever you've provided, a QuickBooks or Xero export, a Power BI export, a direct upload, or a Xactimate estimate standing in until real financials arrive, and groups them by fiscal year.

The most recent fiscal year is what drives the numbers you see first: the gross margin and net margin in the Margin home hero panel, and the operator value shown against the peer benchmark on the Benchmarks tab. Older years don't disappear, they build the Trend chart at the top of Margin, a line of your margin over time with the prior fiscal year overlaid as a ghost line so you can read this year against the same year-ago period, not just against last month.

If you've never uploaded a P&L, the hero panel's Cost Structure tile reads "Add P&L To Unlock" in place of a net margin figure, and the Cost Structure tab's Reported vs Normalized panel simply doesn't appear, there's no reported figure yet to normalize. See your true gross margin, reported vs normalized for what that normalization step does once a P&L is on file.

How category and vendor breakdowns roll up

By cost category. The Peer Comparison By Category list under the Cost Ratios panel repeats the same five-bucket comparison as plain rows: each reads the category name, your percentage, and the peer median percentage side by side. It's the scannable version of the same bars above it, both draw from the identical comparison so they always agree.

By vendor. The Stack Spend tile totals what you pay your vendor stack every month and how many active vendor relationships that spans. When your monthly revenue is known (from the most recent P&L year), the tile also shows that spend as a percentage of revenue, the quick "am I bloated?" read. The tile only appears once at least one vendor relationship has a captured monthly cost; tap it to open the Cost Structure tab.

By line item. The Pricing tab compares what different carriers pay for the identical line-item description across your own jobs, the closest thing to an Xactimate-level cost breakdown. It only populates once at least two carriers have priced the same line item in your book; with fewer than that, there's nothing yet to compare.

1. 1Open Margin from the sidebar.
2. 2Tap the Cost Structure tile (or Wages / Stack Spend, they all open the same tab) to see your cost ratios against peer medians.
3. 3Scroll to Peer Comparison By Category for the plain-row version of the same comparison.
4. 4Tap Pricing to compare what carriers pay for the same line items in your own jobs.
5. 5If a bar or row runs red (above peer), that's the bucket costing you the most relative to your peers, start there.

Empty states

• No cost profile configured. The Cost Ratios panel shows industry-default ratios with a prompt to set up your own.
• No P&L uploaded. The hero's net margin reads "Add P&L To Unlock," the Trend chart has nothing to plot, and the Reported vs Normalized panel is hidden entirely.
• No vendor monthly spend captured. The Stack Spend tile doesn't render; it only appears once at least one vendor relationship has a monthly cost on file.
• Fewer than two carriers pricing the same line. The Pricing tab has nothing to compare yet.

Related reading

• The Cost Structure view
• The cost profile behind your margin
• Your true gross margin, reported vs normalized
• Understanding your margin
• Cash flow and cash runway
• How benchmarks work
• Connecting your data
• Forwarding documents

Data sources