Onboarding and setup cards in the feed

What this is

When you join Verinode, you don't get a giant checklist to fill out before the product will talk to you. Instead, IQ walks you through a 90-day intake program, one step at a time, right inside the Feed you already check every day. Each step arrives as an ordinary-looking decision card: a title, an ask, and a payoff. Act on it (or let the data arrive on its own) and the next step takes its place.

The program is organized into six stages holding 28 milestones in total. Stages run on a trust gradient: the easiest, lowest-stakes asks come first (lock down your account, forward a few software invoices), and the deepest asks (last year's P&L, bank statements, payroll) come last, once you've seen enough value to trust Verinode with them. You only ever see cards from your current stage. The next stage's milestones stay off the feed entirely until every milestone in the stage ahead of it is settled.

This article covers how those setup cards behave in the Feed and what the account-completeness bar riding along each one means. For the full step-by-step checklist view (all six stages, not just your current one), see connecting your data. For how the Feed works generally, see the feed; for the Act / Not Now / Ignore vocabulary every card in the feed shares, see acting on decisions.

Where to find it

Setup cards live in the ordinary Feed at iq.verinode.ai/feed, mixed in with your decisions, articles, and other briefing content under the All filter pill. There's no separate "Onboarding" tab in the sidebar, and no dedicated feed filter for setup work either, a setup card is a decision card, just one whose job is to move your account forward instead of a job or a vendor. Once your whole 90-day program is complete, the cards and the completeness bar both disappear for good; there's nothing left in the feed to mark it as finished.

The six stages

Verinode walks you through these six stages in order:

1. Foundations (6 milestones), Set up your account, lock it down, then capture the easiest savings on the field-doc software you already pay for.
2. Your business surface (6 milestones), Map the vendors, equipment, and locations IQ needs to see your operating costs.
3. Your work (5 milestones), Bring in the jobs, customers, and team so IQ understands how revenue is made.
4. Your network (4 milestones), Capture the carriers, TPAs, and subs you depend on so IQ can score your network strength.
5. Your people and risk (3 milestones), Bring in the certifications, incidents, and insurance so IQ can model your risk surface.
6. Your numbers (4 milestones), The deepest intake. Unlocks the full margin and benchmark layer.

You advance to the next stage the moment every milestone in the current one is settled (completed or skipped). Stage 6 is where the full margin and benchmark experience turns on: a year of P&L, recent bank statements, and a payroll summary are what let Verinode build a real margin breakdown against peers instead of a partial one.

How a milestone becomes a feed card

Every milestone still pending in your current stage gets mirrored into the feed as its own card. Concretely:

• Title, the milestone's name (e.g. "Forward 3 software subscription invoices," "List the carriers you work with").
• The recommendation box below the title ("IQ recommends"), the payoff: what unlocks once you finish the step, in plain terms (e.g. "Per Verinode Research, there's almost always 5-15% sitting on the table with field-doc vendors. The first negotiation plan drops the moment we have your invoices.").
• Badge and source, the card reads as a Decision from Verinode IQ, with a small green dot marking it "Info" severity rather than the red or yellow urgency colors you'd see on a real risk flag. A setup card is guidance, not an alert.

Two milestones skip the generic card entirely and arrive instead as a fully drafted action plan: adding your brand basics, and wiring up email forwarding. IQ has already done the work of drafting the plan for those, so acting on the card opens the finished plan directly rather than a setup step.

1. 1Scroll the Feed under All. A pending milestone from your current stage appears as a decision card, same shape as everything else in the deck.
2. 2Tap Start. Onboarding and setup cards always read "Start" on the primary button (never the generic "Act") because the whole point is sending you into the work, not asking IQ to draft something new.
3. 3A focused, one-task modal opens: just this step, the ask, and the fastest way to finish it. Depending on the milestone, that's an inline form you fill right there (service area, email-forwarding rules, subscription list), your personal forwarding address plus an upload button, a one-line instruction with a link to the right Settings tab, or a link straight to the section that finishes the job (your first action plan, your reviews).
4. 4Finish the task there, or tap Mark done if you've already handled it outside Verinode. The card resolves and the next pending milestone in your stage takes its place on your next feed load.

Not Now on a setup card opens the same reason picker every decision card uses (Too busy / Need more info / Not convinced) and snoozes it rather than closing it for good. Ignore resolves the card the way dismissing any decision does. Either way, the underlying milestone stays on your intake program; you can always pick it back up from the full checklist.

The account-completeness bar

Every setup card carries a slim progress bar just above the Start / Not Now / Ignore row:

• "Account Setup" label on the left, in small caps.
• A fraction on the right: completed milestones / 28 total, counted across the whole 90-day program, not just your current stage.
• A copper fill bar underneath, sized to that percentage.

This is the one place the whole-account picture rides along with the next single action. Since the feed only ever shows you your current stage's cards, the bar is what tells you the step in front of you is, say, milestone 9 of 28, not milestone 9 of 6. The count only moves when a milestone actually settles (completed or skipped); parking a card with Not Now doesn't touch it.

Empty states

Fully onboarded. Once every one of the 28 milestones across all six stages is completed or skipped, both the account-completeness bar and every setup card disappear from the feed entirely. There's no "onboarding complete" card left behind to dismiss. Your feed goes back to being decisions, articles, and the rest of your briefing with nothing setup-related mixed in.

Mid-program, current stage clear. If you finish every milestone in your current stage faster than a page refresh catches up, you won't see a gap: the next feed load advances you to the next stage and its first pending milestones appear in the same slot.

Best-practice example

Say you're three weeks in, sitting in Stage 2 with the vendor list and equipment catalog done and the fleet, facilities, service area, and email-forwarding milestones still open. Your feed shows one card at a time for whichever of those four IQ has picked to surface next, each with the completeness bar reading something like 8/28. You tap Start on "Add your fleet," the modal walks you through listing your trucks, and you tap Mark done. On your next feed visit, that card is gone and the next Stage 2 milestone has taken its place, with the fraction ticked up by one. Once all six Stage 2 milestones are settled, Stage 3's "Share a recent job or claim" appears in Stage 2's place, and the intake program keeps walking forward the same way through Stage 6, where a full year's P&L, recent bank statements, and a payroll summary switch on the complete margin and benchmark layer.

Data sources