The four data categories you can request

What Diligence is

Diligence is Verinode's consent workspace for an acquisition conversation between two operators: a buyer (a multi-location operator, a PE-backed platform, or a franchise HQ evaluating a candidate) and a target company that may or may not already be on Verinode. Instead of emailing spreadsheets back and forth, the buyer opens an engagement and requests specific categories of data. The target reviews the request, decides what to share, and can revoke access at any time. Nothing moves until the target grants it, category by category.

Verinode never hands over raw financial statements, individual invoices, or named employee records. What flows to the buyer is always a normalized view: the target's own ratios and cycle times, read from the same underlying facts Verinode already computes for benchmarking, placed next to peer medians. The target's raw documents stay in the target's own account. This is the same independent-data-trust posture that governs every benchmark on the platform: Verinode surfaces the numbers and the questions worth asking, the two parties negotiate the deal.

Where to find it

Diligence has two entry points, one for each side of the engagement.

• The buyer (the operator or HQ running the diligence process) opens Diligence from the sidebar, at /franchise/diligence (subdomain franchise.verinode.ai or your buyer workspace). This is where engagements are created, tracked, and eventually resolved.
• The target company (the company being evaluated) signs up for a free account from the invite link and lands on Diligence access, at /diligence on their own operator workspace (iq.verinode.ai/diligence). This is where they choose what to share and can revoke it later.

Both sides are looking at the same engagement, but each sees only their own side of the consent boundary: the buyer never sees a category the target hasn't granted, and the target never sees anything about the buyer's other deals.

Opening an engagement (buyer side)

1. 1From the Diligence page, click New engagement.
2. 2Enter the target's Company name and Contact email. Both are required.
3. 3Choose the Deal stage: Post-LOI / Exclusivity (the default) or Pre-LOI.
4. 4Optionally add Location and Website for context.
5. 5Check the Request categories you want: Financials, Jobs & Claims, and AP & Procurement are all selectable and checked by default. Team & Compensation is shown but greyed out, marked "Available after antitrust review" (see below).
6. 6Click Create & get invite link. Verinode emails the target's contact and also gives you a copyable link, in case delivery doesn't land: "Send this link to the [acquisition target/conversion candidate]'s contact. They sign up for a free account and choose what to share. Nothing unlocks until they grant it."

The exact wording of "acquisition target" versus "conversion candidate" depends on who's running the engagement: a PE-backed or multi-location buyer evaluating an outside company sees "acquisition target," while a franchise HQ running an acquirer instance sees "conversion candidate." Functionally the categories and the consent mechanics are identical either way.

Every request also carries a standing disclosure, shown on the create form and repeated on the engagement's detail page: "Computed from the documents provided; Verinode does not verify completeness or audit the underlying data." Diligence numbers are only as complete as what the target has fed into Verinode, and Verinode does not audit or attest to them.

The four categories

Each category is a bundle: a plain-English description shown to both sides, and a small set of normalized metrics that appear in the buyer's comparison once the target grants it.

Financials

What it covers. "Profit & loss and chart of accounts." This is the target's core profitability picture.

What actually shows up once granted: Net Margin, Gross Margin %, and the operating-expense ratio, each as the target's own number next to the buyer's network median and the broader market median. Net margin is Verinode's headline profitability number everywhere on the platform, what the business actually keeps after every cost, not the inflated job-level ("RIA") gross margin some restoration tools lead with. See Understanding your margin for how that number is built.

What the target sees before sharing: "Your normalized profit-and-loss ratios next to peer benchmarks. Not your raw books." No general ledger, no bank statements, no line-item P&L ever crosses to the buyer, only the computed ratios.

Jobs & Claims

What it covers. "Job and claim volume, cycle time, and outcomes."

What actually shows up once granted: Cycle Time (average days from job assignment to completion) and Days to Pay (how long it takes carriers to actually pay once a job is billed), the target's own figures against network and market medians.

What the target sees before sharing: "Your job cycle time and payment timing next to peer benchmarks. Not individual jobs or customers." No customer names, no claim numbers, no addresses. Just the pace of the operation.

AP & Procurement

What it covers. "Accounts payable and materials spend."

What actually shows up once granted: the Materials Ratio, materials cost as a share of revenue, next to network and market medians. This is the number that tells a buyer whether the target is buying well or bleeding margin on the purchasing side.

What the target sees before sharing: "Your materials and AP ratios next to peer benchmarks. Not individual invoices or vendors." No vendor names, no invoice-level detail, no rebate arrangements. Just the ratio.

Team & Compensation

What it covers. "Headcount and compensation structure." This is the one category that behaves differently from the other three.

What actually would show up once granted: the Labor Ratio (labor cost as a share of revenue) and Revenue per Employee, again against network and market medians. No individually identifiable compensation, ever, by design, only aggregate ratios.

What the target would see: "Your headcount and compensation ratios next to peer benchmarks. Not individual employees."

The target's side: Diligence access

When an invited target signs up and follows the invite, they land on a confirmation: "You're in. Nothing is shared yet. Choose what to share, category by category, and revoke any time," with a Review what to share button that opens /diligence.

The Diligence access page shows, for every buyer who has invited them:

• The buyer's name (or "A prospective buyer" if unavailable) and the engagement's status.
• One row per requested category, with its plain-English description and a live preview line: "Shared now: …" if already granted, or "If you share: …" if not, followed by the same preview text quoted above for each category.
• A Share button (turns the category on) or a Revoke button (turns it off), per category, per engagement.

Sharing a category is what makes the engagement go from "Invited" to "Active" the first time it happens. Revoking is immediate: the next time the buyer's workspace reads that category, it's dark. There's no cache and no delay on the buyer side.

"Your position vs the market." Above the per-buyer list, if any buyer has ever asked this target for a category, a standing section shows the target's own numbers against the market for those categories, labeled You and Market, whether or not the target has shared anything with anyone. This is the target's own read of their negotiating position, computed the same way the buyer's comparison is, so a target walking into a deal conversation already knows where their numbers stand.

Empty state (no invitations yet). If nobody has invited this operator into a diligence review, the page reads: "When a prospective buyer invites you into a diligence review, it shows up here. You choose exactly what to share, category by category, and you can revoke access at any time."

The buyer's side: the engagement workspace

Opening an engagement tile from the Diligence home page (or clicking through from an invite acceptance) opens its detail workspace. From top to bottom:

• A Candidate profile section: the buyer's own deal context (location, website, revenue band, number of locations, service lines, deal size band, source, expected close date, deal owner, and a free-text thesis). This is the buyer's private note-taking, never shared with the target and never derived from the target's financials. Empty state: "No deal context yet. Add location, deal size, source, and your thesis to keep this candidate organized."
• A Data access section: one row per requested category, its description, and a right-aligned status, Shared (in green) or Awaiting consent, with the same completeness disclosure repeated below it.
• Questions to resolve before close, which only appears once at least one granted category produces a flagged number. When the target's figure for a metric sits meaningfully off the market median, in the direction that would concern a buyer (materials running hot, labor running hot, margin running soft, cycle time running slow), Diligence phrases it as a question to verify, never a conclusion, for example a prompt to confirm purchasing controls and inventory shrinkage before relying on a materials number, or to reconcile owner compensation and one-time items before relying on a margin number. Verinode never tells you the deal is good or bad; it tells you what to go check.
• The consented comparison, one section per granted category, laid out as a table with the metric name on the left and three right-aligned columns: Target (the company's own number), Your network (the median across your own portfolio, if you run one), and Market (the broader industry median). A category with no grant yet simply doesn't appear here at all, there is no blurred placeholder or teaser row, it's absent until shared.
• Resolve controls, while the engagement is live: Mark won, Mark lost, or Withdraw. Resolving is explained plainly: "Resolving closes the engagement and immediately ends the target's shared access. The record is kept as an audit artifact." Once resolved, the workspace shows a short status line and, once a retention date is set, "Records are retained until [date]."

The Diligence home page itself (/franchise/diligence) opens with three overview tiles: Active ("Sharing data now"), Awaiting acceptance ("Invited, not yet started"), and Resolved ("Won, lost, or withdrawn"), followed by an In progress row of live engagement tiles and a Resolved row underneath. Each tile shows the target's status, name, how many of the requested categories are currently shared (for example "2 of 3 categories shared"), and the deal stage. If nothing is in progress, the row reads: "No engagements in progress. Open one to invite an [acquisition target/conversion candidate] to share their numbers. They get a free account and grant access category by category."

Consent windows and what happens after

A granted category doesn't stay open forever, and resolving a deal doesn't leave data hanging around indefinitely:

• Grants expire automatically after a fixed window (90 days) unless the target re-grants. An expired grant behaves exactly like a revoked one: the buyer's view goes dark on the next read.
• Invite links expire after 30 days if the target never accepts.
• Resolving an engagement (won, lost, or withdrawn) revokes every live grant immediately, and the record itself is retained as an audit artifact for a further 180 days before it ages out.

This consent model is deliberately conservative: consent is opt-in, per category, time-boxed, and instantly revocable, and none of it depends on the buyer remembering to ask nicely.

Known limits

• Live engagements are off. Until the confidentiality, insurance, and no-reliance gates clear, only demo engagements run end to end.
• Only four categories exist today. Fleet and certifications were scoped out for this first version; they may be added later if a design partner asks for them specifically.
• Team & Compensation is informational only until the antitrust review is complete. It shows up in the category list so both sides understand what's coming, but it cannot be requested or granted yet.

Best-practice example

A PE-backed operator group is evaluating a single-location target ahead of an LOI. They open a new engagement, request Financials, Jobs & Claims, and AP & Procurement (Team & Compensation isn't offered), and send the invite. The target signs up, checks their own "Your position vs the market" mirror first (so they know their numbers before anyone else sees them), then shares Financials and Jobs & Claims but holds back AP & Procurement for a later conversation. On the buyer side, the Data access section shows two categories marked Shared and one Awaiting consent, and the comparison table lights up for the two granted categories. The target's materials ratio isn't visible yet, so there's nothing to flag there, but the target's cycle time comes in well above market, and Diligence surfaces it as a question to verify (job mix, backlog) rather than a red flag. The buyer takes that into the next call instead of assuming the worst. If the deal falls through, marking it Closed: Lost immediately shuts off both remaining grants and starts the retention clock.

Related reading

• Understanding your margin: how Net Margin, Gross Margin, and operating expense are computed for any operator, target or otherwise.
• How benchmarks work and Reading a benchmark: what a network median and a market median actually represent.
• Benchmarks overview: the broader benchmarking surface Diligence's comparison numbers are drawn from.
• The decision workspace: the same plan-and-verify pattern behind "Questions to resolve before close."
• Connecting your data and Forwarding documents: how a target's financials, jobs, and AP data get into Verinode in the first place, which is what Diligence has available to normalize and share.