Your SOP library: writing, editing, and scoring SOPs

What this is

Most restoration businesses run on procedures that live in someone's head: how a water loss gets scoped on day one, what order the drying log gets filled out in, who signs off on a supplement. None of that is written down anywhere a new hire, a second crew, or a carrier auditor could check against. My SOPs is Verinode's library of your Standard Operating Procedures, the documented version of how your team actually runs each type of job, structured into named steps and scored for waste the moment you write or upload one.

Verinode does not write your procedures for you. It reads what you send, whatever form it arrives in, structures it into steps with a role, a time estimate, and equipment for each one, then scores the result against LEAN principles and any industry frameworks you attach. You stay the author. Verinode is the AI Co-COO doing the transcription, the structuring, and the scoring, never the decision about what your process should be.

My SOPs is one of three record kinds that share a single home: alongside your own SOPs sit Pending Confirmations (patterns Verinode's agents notice in how your team actually works, waiting for you to confirm) and Standards (the outside IICRC, LEAN, OSHA, EPA, and state reference procedures your SOPs get measured against). This article covers the SOP kind end to end: the tile, the list view, authoring, editing, the LEAN score, and the SOP detail card. See processes-overview for how all three kinds fit together.

Where to find it

Open Processes from the sidebar, under Operations, at /processes. (The Help Center groups this page under Excellence; visiting /excellence takes you to the same workspace.) The page opens on the Processes home; the SOP library lives in two places on it:

• The My SOPs tile in the Explore row, just under the hero numbers.
• The Most recent row at the bottom of the home, which mixes your newest SOPs in with new Pending Confirmations and Standards.

Click either one, or the All Processes tab inside the card slider, and you land in the full, filterable SOP list this article walks through.

The My SOPs tile

On the Processes home, the Explore row carries four metric tiles: My SOPs, To Confirm, Standards (labeled with your state when Verinode knows it, for example "TX + Federal"), and Lines Without An SOP. The My SOPs tile shows:

• A headline count of every active and draft SOP you have written or adopted.
• A sub-line reading "Upload One To Start" when the count is zero, or "Written By You" once you have at least one.
• A row of dots underneath: one per service line you offer, lit when that line already has a documented SOP behind it. It is a coverage-at-a-glance read, not a separate number, so a mostly-lit row tells you your documentation is close to complete without you counting anything.

Click the tile and it opens the All Processes tab pre-filtered to My SOPs.

Right above that row sits the hero band: a headline count of "SOPs written," a pill reading the percentage of your service lines documented (colored green at 90% or above, amber from 60 to 89%, red below that), and a sub-line that reads "Upload your SOPs to get started." with zero SOPs, or "N of your service lines have no SOP yet." while a gap remains, or "Every service line has an SOP." once it's fully closed.

The Most recent row lower on the page mixes SOPs in with your newest Pending Confirmations and Standards, newest first. Each SOP tile there is labeled My SOPs, shows the SOP's title, a subtitle of its LEAN score and work type ("LEAN 82" and "Residential", for example), its category, and how long ago it was created or last touched.

Writing an SOP: the four ways in

Click + Add Process in the page header (or the identical Add Data button every section carries) and a modal titled Send data to Processes opens with a row of capture tabs:

1. 1Drop files. Drag a document onto the dashed drop zone, or click it to browse. A Send multiple at once option handles a batch. Verinode reads PDFs, images, CSVs, Excel, Word docs, video, and audio; a single file is capped at 25 MB.
2. 2Snap a photo. One button, camera on a phone or an image picker on a laptop. Good for a photographed procedure sheet or a whiteboard walkthrough.
3. 3Paste it. A text box for a procedure copied out of an old Word doc or an email chain. The Analyze button unlocks once you've typed at least 10 characters.
4. 4Tell me. A microphone button. Tap to record a walkthrough out loud, tap again to stop. This is the fastest tab for capturing how a job actually runs: a supervisor talking through the mitigation checklist speaks it, Verinode transcribes and structures it.

Whichever tab you use, the modal closes right away with a toast telling you Verinode is working, and a progress card at the bottom of the screen tracks it. Behind the scenes, the language model reads whatever you sent and, when it recognizes a procedure, structures it into:

• A title.
• A category: Water Mitigation, Fire & Smoke, Mold Remediation, Reconstruction, Contents, or General.
• A work type: Residential, Commercial, or Both.
• An ordered list of steps, each with a step type (inspection, extraction, setup, drying, documentation, pack-out, demolition, cleaning, testing, closeout, coordination, or other), a plain description, the role responsible, an estimated time in minutes, and any equipment named.

A high-confidence read goes live as an active SOP immediately. A lower-confidence one still saves and appears in your library, just flagged for you to double-check before you treat it as settled guidance. Either way, LEAN scoring kicks off automatically in the background the moment the SOP is saved, so the score appears on its own a short while later without any extra step from you.

You can also reach the same builder through the Write an SOP launch tile in the Take Action row: it opens a chat-style generator that asks about your process step by step and builds the structured SOP from the conversation once you have covered enough ground.

For the complete walkthrough of every capture tab, the result card, and how a new SOP or observation shows up on the home, see Adding a process.

Finding an SOP in All Processes

Open the All Processes tab (third across the top of the Processes card slider, after Findings and Flow) and a row of kind pills sits at the top: All (N), My SOPs (N), Pending Confirmations (N), Standards (N). Click My SOPs to narrow the list to just your documented procedures. A search box on the right, placeholder "Search processes…", filters further by title, subtitle, or category as you type, combined with whichever pill is active.

Each SOP row shows a copper dot, the SOP's title, a subtitle reading its LEAN score (when it has one) and work type, and a relative timestamp on the right ("14m ago," "3h ago," "5d ago," or a plain date once it's over a week old). Click any row to flip into its full detail card; from there you can swipe or use the on-screen arrows to page through every process record in the order Verinode loaded them, not just the narrower list you had filtered to.

If your business belongs to an HQ network that has shared SOPs into your account, a second Source filter row appears under My SOPs: All, My SOPs, and Network. A network SOP is tagged Network SOP in teal, shows who shared it, its service line, and how many other operators have adopted it, and carries a one-click Import button that copies its anonymized structure into your own library as a draft. See processes-all-processes-tab for the full source-filter walkthrough.

Empty state. If your pill and search combination matches nothing, the list reads:

No processes match this filter yet.

Draft, active, and archived

Every SOP carries a status. The three you control directly:

• Draft. A new SOP, whether built from a capture, a chat, or adopted from a reference standard, starts here. A draft SOP does not count toward peer benchmarks and does not surface as a match on jobs in its category. Inside the detail card, a Status section names it Draft and offers an Activate this SOP button.
• Active. Click Activate this SOP and Verinode confirms: "SOP activated. It now contributes to peer benchmarks and links to jobs." Activation stamps a timestamp the first time only, so archiving and later restoring an active SOP doesn't reset that anchor.
• Archived. Click Archive SOP at the bottom of the detail card and a confirmation explains it will stop appearing in your active list (it isn't deleted). The same control then reads Restore SOP.

A fourth status, needs review, is set automatically rather than by a button: when a procedure arrives through inbound email or a lower-confidence document read, Verinode saves it and scores it right away, but marks it needs-review instead of active until you've had a chance to confirm the extraction landed correctly.

The LEAN score

Once you save or edit an SOP's steps, Verinode analyzes it in the background and returns a LEAN score from 0 to 100, a measure of how much of the procedure is value-add work versus waste. A well-run restoration SOP typically scores in the 55 to 75 range; 80 and above is strong. While the very first pass is still running, the score shows "Pending" with a pulsing dot.

The same analysis produces:

• Framework scores. If you've attached frameworks to the SOP (IICRC S500, S520, or S770, OSHA, or LEAN on its own), each gets its own score out of 100 alongside the overall LEAN number.
• Waste flags. Steps the analysis thinks carry one of the eight LEAN waste types, waiting, transportation, motion, defects, over-processing, overproduction, inventory, or underused skills, each with a description of what's causing it and a specific suggestion for fixing it.
• Top recommendations. Up to three concrete, ordered changes, referencing actual steps and, where relevant, specific standard section numbers.
• A standard delta. When a target score exists for the SOP's category (from an adopted or comparable reference standard), a line reads how many points above or below that target you sit.

Editing the steps and saving re-triggers the analysis, so the score always reflects the latest version of the procedure, never a stale read from an earlier draft.

Jobs Using and the rest of the hero stats

Open any SOP's detail card and four numbers sit in the hero band:

• LEAN Score, the current score or "Pending."
• Steps, the count of documented steps.
• Jobs Using, how many of your jobs have this exact SOP set as their process, not just jobs sharing its category. Zero is normal for a brand-new or draft SOP; the number climbs as jobs get linked to it and closed out.
• Updated, the date the SOP was last edited.

Above these, an eyebrow line reads the record's kind (My SOPs) next to a stance pill, HEALTHY, DRIFT, or EXPOSED, the same three-state read used across the platform: HEALTHY once the SOP is scored 60 or above and was updated recently, DRIFT when the score is missing, below 60, or the SOP is stale, and EXPOSED when an open signal is actively flagging this specific SOP on top of a weak score. The subtitle underneath names the one action Verinode recommends right now, never a generic nudge.

Inside the Details tab

The Details tab is where every SOP-specific section lives, in this order:

1. Status (adopted-from or draft banner, when relevant, covered above).
2. Adherence (90 days). Whether jobs in this SOP's category are actually being run the way it's written, based on your last 90 days of closed-out jobs: a followed/total count, a trust-level pill, a 13-week sparkline, and a variance line comparing actual time against the SOP's own time estimates.
3. Credentials this SOP implies, only for SOPs adopted from a standard that declares required or preferred certifications: each shows how many of your active team members hold it against how many the standard calls for.
4. LEAN Score, Framework Scores, Top Recommendations, and Waste Signals, the analysis output described above.
5. Process Rating, a separate three-dimension rating (Effectiveness, Usability, Compliance) plus, once at least one job has run against the SOP, an Outcome Correlation line comparing average margin on jobs that used it against jobs that didn't.
6. Link to Carrier or TPA, a single-select dropdown tying the SOP to one client, surfacing that client's specific requirements once linked.
7. Link to Vendors, Team, or Equipment, three chip pickers so IQ can reach for this SOP when you ask about a linked vendor, team member, or piece of equipment elsewhere on the platform.
8. The step editor, read-only by default, with an Edit steps button that flips every row into an editable form (type, description, role, equipment, estimated minutes), plus + Add step, Remove, Save steps, and Cancel controls. Steps a source standard locks in by citation carry a copper Required pill and prompt a confirmation naming the citation before you can delete them.
9. Feedback, community sentiment, a free-text feedback box, a Quick Survey button, and the archive control.

For the full field-by-field breakdown of every section, see Inside an SOP; for the step editor specifically, see Editing SOP steps.

Open Tips and Findings

Two more tabs sit alongside Details, appearing only when there's something to show, each carrying a numeric badge on its label:

• Open Tips. Process-domain signals tied specifically to this SOP: a headline, the rationale behind it, and, when there is one, a recommended action.
• Findings. Active items in your feed that link back to this SOP, each with its action title and cost-of-inaction summary. See The decision workspace and Acting on decisions for how those get worked once you click through.

Both tabs stay hidden entirely, not shown empty, when there's nothing to display.

Best-practice example

Say your best estimator has never written down how she scopes a water loss, it's all in her head after years of jobs. Open Processes, click + Add Process, and hand her the Tell me tab. She talks through her walkthrough for a few minutes: moisture readings first, photos before any equipment moves, a specific order for tear-out decisions. Verinode transcribes it, structures it into a titled SOP with individual steps and an estimated total time, and saves it as a draft or active SOP depending on how confidently it read the recording. LEAN scoring runs automatically; if the waste flags point at a step that causes waiting, you or she can open the step editor, tighten the description, save, and watch the score move. Once you're comfortable with it, activate it: it starts counting toward peer benchmarks, and the next job in that category that gets linked to it starts feeding the Jobs Using count and the adherence read.

Related reading

• Processes: your SOPs, standards, and how work actually flows
• Adding a process
• Inside an SOP: LEAN score, steps, waste, and links
• Editing SOP steps
• All Processes: browse, filter, and search your records
• Understanding your margin
• The decision workspace
• Acting on decisions