The candidate profile: buyer-owned deal context

What the candidate profile is

Every Diligence engagement is built around a target company, the operator a buyer is evaluating for acquisition. The candidate profile is the deal-context card at the top of that engagement's detail page: location, website, revenue band, number of locations, service lines, deal size, source, expected close, deal owner, and a free-text thesis.

None of this comes from the target. It is buyer-owned, meaning your own deal team types it in and can edit it at any time. It exists so the people running the deal have somewhere to keep the firmographics and internal deal notes that never show up in a P&L, right next to the numbers the target eventually shares.

Where to find it

Open Diligence from the sidebar, under Transactions, at /franchise/diligence. That list page shows every engagement your workspace has open. Click into any candidate to open its engagement detail page.

The candidate profile is the first section on that detail page, directly under the header (company name, status pill, and deal stage). It sits above Data access, above any comparison tables, and above the resolve controls at the bottom.

Reading the card

The section header reads Candidate profile, in small caps. Next to it, a text link does one of two things depending on whether the profile has anything in it:

• Add deal context, when nothing has been filled in yet.
• Edit, once at least one field has a value.

That link only appears for workspace admins. If you can view the engagement but aren't an admin, the card is read-only: no link, no edit form.

When the profile has data, it renders as a stack of label/value rows, one per field, with the label on the left and the value right-aligned:

• Location. Free text, for example "Austin, TX." No format is enforced.
• Website. Rendered as a clickable link that opens in a new tab. If you typed a bare domain like acmerestoration.com, Verinode adds https:// automatically when building the link; you never need to type the scheme yourself.
• Revenue. One of five bands: <$5M, $5-10M, $10-25M, $25-50M, $50M+. This is the target's approximate top-line revenue as your deal team understands it, not a number pulled from any shared financials.
• Locations. A plain number, the count of the target's operating locations.
• Service lines. A comma-separated list drawn from six restoration service lines: Water, Fire, Mold, Reconstruction, Contents, Commercial large loss. Only the lines you've selected show up here; the row is skipped entirely if none are selected.
• Deal size. One of four enterprise-value bands: <$5M, $5-15M, $15-50M, $50M+. This is your team's estimate of the transaction size, independent of the revenue band above.
• Source. How the deal was originated: Proprietary, Broker, Inbound, or Referral.
• Expected close. A date, formatted like "Sep 15, 2026."
• Deal owner. Free text, typically the internal lead running the deal.
• Thesis. A free-text paragraph underneath its own label, shown with line breaks preserved exactly as you typed them. This is where your team writes down why this candidate, and what needs to be proven out before closing.

Every row is optional and only renders when it has a value. A candidate profile can be as thin as just a location, or as full as all ten fields.

Empty state

If none of the ten fields have been filled in, the card shows this line, verbatim:

No deal context yet. Add location, deal size, source, and your thesis to keep this candidate organized.

That's the entire empty state: no placeholder rows, no zeroed-out numbers. The Add deal context link (admins only) is how you get out of it.

Editing the profile

Click Edit (or Add deal context) to switch the card into a form. It's a two-column grid covering Location, Website, Revenue, Locations, Deal size, Source, Expected close, and Deal owner, followed by the service-line toggles and the thesis textarea:

1. 1Location and Website are plain text inputs.
2. 2Revenue and Deal size are dropdowns; each defaults to "Not set" and lists only the bands above, so you can't type a free-form revenue figure here.
3. 3Locations is a number input (placeholder "e.g. 6"). Leave it blank to clear it.
4. 4Source is a dropdown of the four origination values above, also defaulting to "Not set."
5. 5Expected close is a native date picker.
6. 6Deal owner is a plain text input (placeholder "Internal lead").
7. 7Service lines render as a row of pill buttons, one per line. Click a pill to toggle it on (it fills with a copper tint and border) or off. You can select any combination, including none.
8. 8Thesis is a multi-line textarea (placeholder: "Why this candidate, and what you need to prove out.").
9. 9Click Save profile to persist the form, or Cancel to discard your edits and return to the read view.

On a successful save you'll see a "Profile saved." confirmation, the card closes back to the read view with your changes reflected immediately, and the page refreshes to pick up the update everywhere else it's used.

Setting it at creation

You don't have to wait until the engagement exists to add basic deal context. The New engagement form (opened from the Diligence list page) includes optional Location and Website fields alongside the required company name, contact email, deal stage, and requested categories. Whatever you enter there becomes the starting candidate profile, and you can fill in the rest (revenue band, service lines, deal size, source, expected close, deal owner, thesis) from the engagement detail page afterward.

Who can see and edit it

The candidate profile lives entirely on the buyer side. The target company never sees it, has no way to view it, and nothing in it is disclosed to them at any point in the engagement. Only workspace admins on the buyer's team can edit it; other workspace members with visibility into the engagement can read it but won't see the Edit link.

Why it stays separate from the target's numbers

Verinode's Diligence workspace draws a hard line between two kinds of information on the same page:

• What you believe about the deal (the candidate profile: your revenue estimate, your deal-size band, your thesis) is typed in by your team and can be wrong, outdated, or aspirational. It is deal preparation, not evidence.
• What the target has actually shared (financials, jobs and claims, AP and procurement, depending on which categories they've granted) is read from the target's own operator data, only after they consent, and only for as long as that grant stays live.

Keeping these visually and structurally separate means nobody on your team can mistake a hopeful revenue-band guess for a verified number, and it keeps the comparison tables further down the page honest: they show the target's own figures against your network and the broader market, never a blend with what your deal team assumed going in.

Related reading

• Diligence: the acquisition data room, explained
• How benchmarks work
• Reading a benchmark
• Understanding your margin