Reading the data-access state on an engagement

What this page is

Verinode Diligence is a buyer-side workspace inside Verinode | HQ for running acquisition diligence on another restoration business, an acquisition target if you are a multi-location buyer, or a conversion candidate if you are a franchise evaluating a prospective franchisee. Each business you are evaluating gets its own engagement. The engagement detail page is where you watch that target grant, or withhold, access to their own numbers, and where the numbers appear once they do.

Nothing here is scraped or inferred. The target controls every category on their own consent screen, one at a time, and can revoke at any point. This article is about reading that state correctly: what "Shared" and "Awaiting consent" actually mean, what invite acceptance has to do with it, and why every number on the page carries the same completeness note.

Where to find it

Open Diligence from the HQ sidebar (route /diligence). That list page shows an overview strip (Active, Awaiting acceptance, Resolved) and a row of tiles, one per engagement, each showing the target's company name, its status, a "N of N categories shared" line, and its deal stage. Click a tile to open the engagement detail page at /diligence/[id], the page this article covers.

If no engagement is in progress yet, the list page 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.

Use New engagement in the header to start one. That flow is covered in a separate article; this one picks up once an engagement exists and you have opened it.

The header: status, stage, and invite acceptance

At the top of the detail page:

• Company name, as you entered it when you created the engagement.
• A status pill: Invited, Active, Closed: Won, Closed: Lost, Withdrawn, or Expired. This is the engagement's lifecycle state, not the consent state, an engagement can sit at Invited or Active for as long as the target is deciding what to share.
• A Demo pill, shown only on synthetic practice engagements. It never appears on a real one.
• A deal-stage line: Pre-LOI or Post-LOI / Exclusivity, whichever you set when you opened the engagement.
• An invite-acceptance clause appended to that same line: "Target has accepted the invite" once the person you invited has signed up and linked their account to this engagement, or "Awaiting invite acceptance" if they have not yet.

That last clause is the first thing to check when a data-access row looks stuck. Every category row on this page depends on the target having an account linked to the engagement. If invite acceptance has not happened, every category will read Awaiting consent, because there is no one on the other end who could have granted anything yet. Once they accept, they land on their own consent screen and choose what to share, category by category, from there.

Data access: the per-category rows

Below the header, the Data access section lists one row per category you requested when you opened the engagement, in this order:

| Category | What it covers | |---|---| | Financials | Profit & loss and chart of accounts. | | Jobs & Claims | Job and claim volume, cycle time, and outcomes. | | AP & Procurement | Accounts payable and materials spend. | | Team & Compensation | Headcount and compensation structure. |

Each row shows the category label, its one-line description, and a right-aligned status word:

• Shared, in green, when the target has actively granted that category and the grant has not expired or been revoked.
• Awaiting consent, in neutral text, for every other case, not yet decided, declined, revoked after being shared, or expired.

That is a deliberate simplification. The underlying grant record can be in one of three states, granted, revoked, or expired, but the buyer view only ever shows you the live/not-live binary: Shared or Awaiting consent. If a row you had previously seen as Shared flips back to Awaiting consent, the target revoked it, the consent window lapsed, or they never granted it in the first place. The row does not tell you which. What it guarantees is the thing that matters most for a buyer relying on this data: the moment a grant is not live, you stop seeing that category's numbers, on the very next page load. There is no cached copy sitting around on your side once access closes.

Consent windows are time-bound, not indefinite. A grant defaults to a 90-day access window from when the target shares it. If it is not renewed, it lapses on its own and the category reads Awaiting consent again, the same as an explicit revocation from the buyer's point of view.

If no categories were requested at all, the section reads:

No categories were requested.

That is a configuration state on your own engagement, not something the target controls, it means the New engagement form was submitted without selecting any category.

The completeness note

Directly under the category rows, every engagement carries this line:

Computed from the documents provided; Verinode does not verify completeness or audit the underlying data.

Read that literally. It is stamped on every number this page will ever show you, not just the categories currently marked Awaiting consent. Verinode normalizes whatever documents and connected data the target has fed into their own account, it does not independently confirm that what they shared is the whole picture, and it does not audit the underlying figures against source records. A category reading Shared tells you the target chose to open that data to you. It is not, by itself, a completeness or accuracy guarantee, that is still diligence work you do.

The consented comparison and the questions it raises

Once a category is Shared and the target has a linked account with enough history, the page adds a numeric comparison underneath the category list: the target's own figure next to your network's median and the broader market median, for the handful of metrics that category covers (net margin, gross margin, and operating-expense ratio under Financials, for example). See how benchmarks work and reading a benchmark for how those network and market columns are built and what a median column means; the comparison here reads the same way, it is just scoped to one target instead of your own book. For the margin figures specifically, understanding your margin covers what net margin, gross margin, and operating-expense ratio each represent.

When the target's figure sits meaningfully off the market median on the side that matters for that metric, Verinode does not draw a conclusion, it surfaces a "Questions to resolve before close" section instead, one plain-language verification prompt per outlier (for example, checking purchasing controls before relying on a materials ratio, or confirming crew mix before relying on a labor ratio). Verinode never states whether a target's number is good or bad on your behalf, it flags what to check and leaves the read to you.

Resolving the engagement

While an engagement is Invited or Active, a Resolve section offers three actions: Mark won, Mark lost, and Withdraw. The page tells you plainly what resolving does:

Resolving closes the engagement and immediately ends the target's shared access. The record is kept as an audit artifact.

Once resolved, the section is replaced with a short status line, "This engagement is closed: won." (or lost, or withdrawn), and, if a retention date is set, a note of when the record itself is retained until. Records are kept for a fixed window after resolution so you retain an audit trail of what was shared and when, even though the target's live access has already closed.

1. 1Check the header line first: has the target accepted the invite? If not, every row will read Awaiting consent regardless of anything else.
2. 2Read the Data access rows top to bottom. Shared categories will carry a comparison underneath them; Awaiting consent categories will not, there is nothing yet to compute.
3. 3Treat every number, Shared or not, against the completeness note: it reflects what was provided, not an audited total.
4. 4Work any items under Questions to resolve before close as verification tasks, not as a verdict on the deal.
5. 5Resolve the engagement (won, lost, or withdrawn) once the deal is decided. That is the action that ends the target's access; letting an engagement sit idle does not.

Data sources