Adding a facility

What a facility is

A facility is a physical location your business operates from: an office, a warehouse, an equipment yard, a truck hub, a storage unit, a branch, or any mixed-use space. Verinode's Facilities section is where your own physical footprint lives, separate from client jobs and vendor relationships. Rent, leases, compliance events, consumables on hand, and recurring costs all attach to a facility once it exists on file, so adding the facility is the first step before any of that can flow in.

Right now, adding a facility is a manual entry: you type in the basics and Verinode records them. A lease-document parser that reads a PDF and fills in the facility and its lease terms for you is planned for a later phase; until then, the + Add Facility button is the only way a facility gets created.

Where to find it

Open Facilities from the sidebar at /facilities. The page opens directly on the Facilities home, no separate list view to click into first. The + Add Facility button sits in the "Explore" area of that home screen, next to the row of tabs (Footprint, Leases, Compliance, Consumables, Costs). Clicking it opens the Add Facility modal as an overlay; the page underneath stays visible but frozen behind it.

You can also reach the same button from inside the slider: if you have already opened the Footprint tab and it is empty, its body text tells you to "Use + Add Facility in the page header to capture your first office, warehouse, equipment yard, or truck hub."

The Add Facility modal, field by field

The modal has one required field on its own line, two required fields side by side, and then a set of optional fields underneath. Fields marked with an asterisk in the form are required to save.

Name (required)

A free-text field for what you call the location, for example "Tampa Warehouse." This is the label every table row, tile, and drill-in profile shows for the facility afterward, so use something your team will recognize at a glance rather than a formal legal address. Leaving it blank and clicking Add Facility stops the save with "Facility name is required."

Type (required)

A dropdown with eight options:

• Office
• Warehouse
• Equipment Yard
• Truck Hub
• Storage Unit
• Branch
• Mixed-use
• Other

Type drives how the facility is grouped and labeled everywhere else on the platform (the Footprint table's Type column, the facility profile header, and so on). It defaults to Office when the modal opens.

If you pick Other, a new required field appears immediately below the Type/Ownership row: What kind of facility, a free-text box (placeholder examples: "Training facility, Document recovery vault") where you describe it. Whatever you type there becomes the facility's displayed type instead of the word "Other." Trying to save with Type set to Other and this field left blank stops you with "Describe what kind of property this is." Switch back to any of the seven standard types and this field disappears; if you had typed something into it before switching, it is dropped rather than saved.

Ownership (required)

A dropdown alongside Type with four options:

• Owned
• Leased
• Rented
• Subleased

This describes your relationship to the space, and it defaults to Leased when the modal opens. Ownership feeds the ownership-mix breakdown on the Facilities home hero panel, so a facility you own reads differently in that mix than one you lease. It does not create a lease record by itself: choosing Leased, Rented, or Subleased here does not add rent terms, a landlord, or a renewal date. Those live on the facility's own Lease tab, added separately once the facility exists.

Address, City, State / Region, Postal Code (optional)

A street-address line, then a row of three fields for city, state or region, and postal code. All four are optional at creation. Leave them blank if you only need the location's name and type recorded today; you can fill in the address later from the facility's profile. Country is not shown in the modal and defaults to the United States (US) if you don't provide one; there is no country selector at add time.

Street address content (the Address field) is written to your operator record encrypted at rest under your Vault Key, alongside your other narrative and address fields. City, state/region, and postal code are stored as plain, coarser geography (not encrypted) because they double as the regional grouping that any facility-related benchmark would use, similar to how job addresses are handled elsewhere on the platform.

Square Footage (optional)

A number field for the facility's square footage, for example "12000." Leave it blank if you don't know it yet. If you do enter a value, it has to be zero or a positive number; a negative or non-numeric entry stops the save with "Square footage must be a positive number." This number rolls up into the "total sqft" figure on the Facilities home hero panel and shows as a right-aligned number in the Footprint table's Sqft column; facilities without a value show a dash there instead of a number.

Primary Use Notes (optional)

A short free-text box (two lines tall, placeholder example: "Office + admin, drying chamber storage + truck staging") for what actually happens at this location day to day, especially useful for a mixed-use space where the Type dropdown alone doesn't capture everything going on there. If filled in, it appears as a small line of muted text under the facility's name in the Footprint table. Like the address fields, this text is encrypted at rest under your Vault Key rather than stored in plain text.

There is no separate "Notes" field in the Add modal itself. A general notes field exists on the facility record and can be filled in later from the facility's profile or an update, but it is not part of the initial add form.

What happens on save

Clicking Add Facility with a valid Name, Type, and Ownership does the following:

1. The facility is written to your operator record with Status: Active by default. Status is not a field you set here; every new facility starts active and moves through Inactive, Under Renovation, Exiting, or Exited later, from the facility's own profile or the exit workflow.
2. Source is recorded as Manual, distinguishing this facility from ones that will arrive later through lease-document parsing, invoice parsing, an API connection, or a franchise-HQ seed. You'll see this distinction reflected in how a facility got onto your list once other ingestion paths exist.
3. The modal closes, the page behind it refreshes, and the new facility appears in the Footprint tab's table (Name, Type, Ownership, Address, Sqft, Status columns) and in the "Recently added" row on the Facilities home. The Footprint tab's empty-state message ("No facilities yet…") is replaced by a line reading how many locations are now on file, for example "1 location on file. Click a row to open the facility profile."
4. The Facilities home hero panel's active-facility count, total square footage, and ownership-mix breakdown all update to include the new row.
5. The add is recorded in your action history (an audit entry logging the facility's name, type, ownership, city, state/region, and square footage at the moment of creation), so the record of who added what and when is preserved even if the facility is edited or later exited.

While the save is in flight, the button reads "Saving…" and all fields lock. If the save fails for any reason (a database error, for instance), the modal stays open, unlocks the fields, and shows the underlying error message in place of the form so you can retry without re-typing everything.

After the facility is added

The new row is a starting point, not a finished record. From its profile (reached by clicking the row in the Footprint tab) you can fill in the rest of what the platform tracks for a location: a lease (landlord, term dates, monthly rent, escalation, notice period), compliance events (fire inspection, OSHA posting, business license, certificate of insurance, and similar recurring requirements), consumables on hand (PPE, drying equipment, antimicrobial supplies), and recurring costs (utilities, internet, security monitoring, janitorial, property tax, insurance). None of that is required at add time. Verinode surfaces what's missing and what's coming due as those pieces fill in; it does not require you to front-load them before the facility can exist on your list.

Related reading

• Understanding your margin
• How benchmarks work
• Connecting your data
• Forwarding documents

Data sources