Opening a new engagement and sending the invite

What it is

Diligence is the workspace where a buyer HQ reviews an acquisition target's numbers before closing a deal, without ever asking that target to build a data room by hand. An "engagement" is the container for one deal: it holds the target's name, contact, deal stage, and the categories of data you have asked to review. The moment you open one, Verinode sends the target a free-account invite. They sign up, look at exactly what you have requested, and choose what to share, category by category. Nothing about their business appears on your side until they grant it.

Verinode does not run the deal for you and it does not decide what the target should share. It normalizes whatever the target grants into the same peer-benchmark ratios you already see on your own numbers, so a Post-LOI review reads like an internal one instead of a stack of PDFs from the target's bookkeeper.

Where to find it

Open Diligence from the sidebar, under the Transactions heading. This section only appears for HQ workspaces that are set up as a buyer (an acquiring company, or in a later phase a franchisor evaluating a conversion candidate). If you do not see Diligence in your sidebar, your workspace has not been enabled for it.

The Diligence home page opens on three things:

• An Overview row with three tiles: Active ("Sharing data now"), Awaiting acceptance ("Invited, not yet started"), and Resolved ("Won, lost, or withdrawn"). These are simple counts of your engagements in each state.
• An In progress row listing every engagement that is invited or active. Each tile shows the target company name, a status label, how many of the requested categories have been shared (for example "2 of 3 categories shared"), the deal stage, and a "Demo" tag when the engagement is a practice one. If you have no engagements in progress, the row reads: "No engagements in progress. Open one to invite an acquisition target to share their numbers. They get a free account and grant access category by category." (Franchise workspaces see "conversion candidate" in place of "acquisition target" throughout.)
• A Resolved row of engagements you have closed out, which is simply omitted if you have not resolved any yet.

The New engagement button sits in the page header, top right, next to the Diligence title. Clicking it opens the New engagement modal, which is the subject of this article.

Opening a new engagement

The New engagement modal asks for five things and gives you one optional note about how the data you will see is scoped.

1. 1Company name. A free-text field for the target's legal or trading name, for example "Acme Restoration." This is required. It is stored as deal-confidential information: Verinode treats it, along with the deal stage, as something that should never surface in logs or anywhere outside your own engagement view.
2. 2Contact email. The email address of the person at the target company who should receive the invite, typically their controller or CFO, for example "controller@acme.com." This is required and must be a valid email address; the Create button stays disabled until it contains an "@."
3. 3Deal stage. A dropdown with two options: Post-LOI / Exclusivity (the default) and Pre-LOI. This is a label for your own tracking, it does not change what the target can share or what you can see.
4. 4Location and Website, both optional. Location is a free-text field (for example "Austin, TX") and Website is a free-text field (for example "acmerestoration.com"). These are deal context you are filling in yourself, not anything pulled from the target, and you can come back and edit them later from inside the engagement.
5. 5Request categories. A checklist of the data you want the target to consider sharing. Three are selectable today:
6. 6- Financials, Profit & loss and chart of accounts.
7. 7- Jobs & Claims, Job and claim volume, cycle time, and outcomes.
8. 8- AP & Procurement, Accounts payable and materials spend.
9. 9A fourth category, Team & Compensation (headcount and compensation structure), is shown but grayed out and cannot be checked. Its note reads "Available after antitrust review." This category is held back until the underlying compensation-benchmark surface clears the same antitrust sign-off that gates wage data anywhere else on the platform. At least one category must be checked before you can create the engagement; all three selectable categories are checked by default.

Under the checklist, a fixed note reads: "Computed from the documents provided; Verinode does not verify completeness or audit the underlying data." This same line appears on every number the target's grant eventually produces on your side. It exists because a target can grant a category before every document behind it has been provided, and Verinode will not let a partial or curated dataset read as an audited one.

Creating the engagement and getting the invite

Once Company name and Contact email are filled in and at least one category is checked, the Create & get invite link button becomes active. Click it and Verinode:

1. Opens the engagement in Invited status, with your requested categories attached.
2. Builds a signed, time-boxed invite link (valid for 30 days) that routes the target to the account-creation and consent flow. This is not a generic sign-up link, it is bound to this specific engagement.
3. Sends an invite email to the contact address you entered, from the Verinode team, with you cc'd as the reply-to.

If the same target contact is already invited into or active in another live engagement, the create attempt is rejected with a neutral message: "This company can't be invited right now." Verinode does not confirm or deny that a competing engagement exists, it simply will not let two buyers run diligence on the same target's data at once.

What you see after you click Create

The modal switches to a confirmation view. The title reads Invitation sent if the email went out successfully, or Invite ready if it did not (delivery is best-effort and never blocks the engagement from being created).

• If the email sent: "We emailed the invitation to [the contact's email]. They sign up for a free account and choose what to share. Nothing unlocks until they grant it. You can also share this link directly:"
• If it did not: "Send this link to the acquisition target's contact. They sign up for a free account and choose what to share. Nothing unlocks until they grant it."

Either way, the invite link itself is shown in a read-only field with a Copy button beside it, so you always have a fallback way to hand the target the link yourself, by text, by a second email, however you reach them. Clicking Copy shows a confirmation toast, "Invite link copied." Click Done to close the modal; the Diligence home page refreshes and the new engagement now appears in the In progress row, in Invited status.

What the invite email says

The email the target's contact receives is from Verinode, not from a generic sign-up flow, because the target has no relationship with Verinode yet. Its subject line is your company name asking to review the target's numbers, for example "Acme Restoration Network has asked to review Harbor Restoration & Recovery's numbers." The body:

• Names you (or whichever admin opened the engagement) and your company, and states plainly that you are evaluating a potential acquisition and have asked to review the target's financials through Verinode, "an independent data platform built for the restoration industry."
• Explains that Verinode collects and normalizes the numbers so the target's team does not have to assemble or reformat anything by hand, that creating an account is free, and that they choose exactly what to share, one category at a time. It states directly: "Nothing is shared until you grant it, and you can revoke access at any point. This is a free account with no obligation to complete a deal."
• Carries an Accept the invitation button that opens the signed invite link.
• Closes with a plain-language line on exactly what you, the buyer, will be able to see: "Only your normalized ratios, shown next to peer benchmarks, and only for the categories you grant. Never your raw documents, your customers, or your individual transactions. Verinode does not sell operator data."

That last line is not marketing copy, it is the actual contract of the feature. The categories map to specific, pre-defined peer-benchmark metrics (for example Financials surfaces net margin, gross margin, and operating-expense ratio), never a raw ledger or invoice, and never anything outside the categories the target has actively granted.

Editing the deal profile after creation

Location, website, and the other deal-context fields (revenue band, number of locations, service lines, deal size band, deal source, expected close date, deal owner, and your internal thesis notes) can all be filled in or changed later from inside the engagement, independent of what the target has shared. None of this is visible to the target, it is your own tracking of the deal.

Resolving an engagement

When a deal reaches its end, whether you win it, lose it, or walk away, you resolve the engagement from inside its detail view as Closed: Won, Closed: Lost, or Withdrawn. Resolving immediately revokes every grant the target has made, so your visibility into their data goes dark the moment the engagement closes, not after some delay. A resolved engagement moves out of the In progress row and into Resolved.

Empty states, summarized

• In progress row, no active engagements: "No engagements in progress. Open one to invite an acquisition target to share their numbers. They get a free account and grant access category by category."
• Resolved row, nothing resolved yet: the row does not render at all.
• Team & Compensation category: always shown, always disabled, labeled "Available after antitrust review" until that category is cleared for use.

Related reading

• How benchmarks work for how the peer comparisons behind each requested category are actually built.
• Reading a benchmark for how to interpret the ratios once a target grants a category.
• Understanding your margin for what the Financials category's net margin and gross margin figures mean.