Network benchmarks: how the section works

What this section is

Benchmarks is the network intelligence hub inside Verinode HQ: the market-facing read on how your network's offices compare to each other and to the broader restoration industry, plus the same vendor, materials, carrier, and research intelligence every operator sees on their own Verinode IQ. It is not a job-management, LMS, CRM, or accounting screen, and it is not where you check a single office's day-to-day operations. That's what Network Health covers, see Network health. Benchmarks is where you read the market: margins, cash velocity, cost structure, carrier and TPA behavior, material prices, and industry trends, with your network's own offices marked against those distributions.

Verinode HQ never decides anything for you. It surfaces the network's position in the market and its own internal spread, office to office, and leaves the read to your leadership team.

Where to find it

Open Benchmarks from the HQ sidebar, at hq.verinode.ai/benchmarks. The page opens straight into the Benchmarks tab, the market's operating distributions. A pill tab bar at the top of the page holds the section's five tabs:

Benchmarks · Carriers & TPAs · Materials · Vendor Intelligence · Equipment Intelligence

Until August 2026 this hub also carried Industry Data, Analyst Reports, and Industry News. Those three moved into their own Industry Data section, directly beneath Benchmarks in the HQ sidebar, on both HQ and IQ. The line is provenance: everything left in Benchmarks is built from operator-contributed data, and everything in Industry Data was published by someone else. See Network industry data.

Tap a pill to switch tabs. Only the active tab's content is on screen at a time, there's no long scroll or section anchors. A thin ticker along the bottom edge of the screen crawls a slow-moving strip of headline metric medians (net margin, collection rate, labor ratio, and similar), so the market keeps moving in the background no matter which tab you're on. It only appears once enough metrics have a value to show.

How this hub is built

Benchmarks in HQ is not a separate build. It's the same Benchmarks experience your franchisees use on their own Verinode IQ, the identical tab layout, the identical row and drill-in components, mounted in network mode instead of single-operator mode. That's a deliberate choice: the read your leadership team gets here is the same read every operator already trusts, applied to your whole network instead of to one business.

What changes in network mode:

• The "you" in every chart becomes your network. On IQ, a metric row shows one operator's value against the peer market. On HQ, the same row shows your network's own aggregate value against the industry, and (where the metric supports it) your own offices' spread against each other.
• The scope and cohort pickers disappear. IQ operators can narrow the read to National, Regional, or a specific group, or filter to a job type or a "similar shape" health cohort. None of that applies to a network of offices, so HQ's Benchmarks tab drops straight into the full read with no filter row.
• There's no "hide my position" toggle. An individual operator can choose to read the market clean, without their own dot on the chart. HQ's own network position is always shown, there's no reason to hide it from your own leadership team.
• Rating and program-approval actions are turned off. Vendor and Equipment Intelligence are fully populated for HQ, but the inline "rate this vendor" control that an operator uses on their own IQ isn't offered here. HQ reads the network's peer ratings and Verinode Research Scores; individual operators are the ones who submit them.
• Research access is fully unlocked. Analyst Reports render at full strength for HQ, with no paywall blur. The Contributor-tier preview blur that partially locks premium research for some individual operators doesn't apply to HQ network accounts.

The privacy boundary: aggregates only

This is the rule that makes the whole hub trustworthy, so it's worth stating plainly before walking through the tabs.

HQ never sees an individual franchisee's underlying business records here. No single invoice, job, estimate, financial statement, or vendor contract belonging to one of your offices ever surfaces on this page. Everything you read in Benchmarks is one of two things:

1. Your own network's aggregated and per-office metrics. Margin, cash velocity, cost ratios, service speed, and the rest of the Benchmarks and Materials categories are computed across your offices and shown two ways: the network's own distribution (what's typical across your offices) and, when you drill into a row, each office's value on that one metric, named and ranked best to worst. That ranking is a performance number, not the underlying data that produced it, you see that an office's collection rate is 78% and ranks second in your network, not the receivables ledger behind it.
2. Network-wide peer intelligence that never identifies a single contributor. Carrier and TPA behavior, material prices, peer ratings, and Verinode Research Scores are built from many operators' contributions across the whole Verinode network, anonymized before they ever reach a benchmark. A metric only starts showing a peer number once enough operators have contributed to it, below that point the row shows the row's cohort as still forming rather than a number that could be traced back to one business. Verinode never lowers that bar to make a chart look fuller, and it never tells you, or anyone, how many contributors sit behind a given number.

Franchisees own their own data. What rolls up to HQ here is the performance read your network agreement covers, aggregate benchmarks and rankings, not a window into any one office's private books.

The Benchmarks tab

This is where the page opens. It reads your network's operating distributions across dozens of categories: Profitability, Cash Velocity, Cost Structure, Sales & Marketing, Service Speed, Productivity, Safety, Equipment & Fleet, Performance Score, Reputation, Certifications, Team Performance, Recruiting & Hiring, Facilities & Real Estate, Vehicle Fleet, Workforce, Platform Engagement, Clients & Sales Mix, Job Mix & Specialization, Profitability by Job Type, Vendor & Procurement, and (for networks running an exterior division) Exterior & Roofing.

Each category groups related metrics into rows. A category with nothing to show for your network yet does not hide: it lists the metrics it would carry, by name, each marked "Not enough offices", under a line saying so. It disappears only when there is nothing nameable behind it at all.

Reading one row. Every row is one metric:

• The metric name, with an info icon if there's a methodology note behind it, and a bell icon to watch that metric (get notified when it moves).
• A distribution strip, the hero of the row. It shows your own offices' spread on that metric, the middle 50% shaded, with a tick for the industry median labeled above the strip. Your network's own value sits as a colored dot on the same strip, green when it's ahead of the industry reference, red when it's behind.
• A value column, headed Network median, showing your network's own figure for that metric, colored the same way as the dot.
• A dollar-impact column, for metrics where a percentage-point gap translates cleanly to real money (margin, collection rate, cost ratios). It shows the estimated annual dollar difference between your network's position and the industry reference, captioned "Est. vs Industry / Yr". Where a dollar translation would be misleading, safety and reputation percentages for instance, the cell shows a dash and a ? you can hover for the reason rather than sitting silently empty. A network level with the industry reads "At industry" instead.
• A coverage line under the metric name, on the rows that need one. Every row on this tab is drawn from your own offices, so that fact sits in the column heading rather than under each name. What a row does say for itself is a shortfall: "6 of 8 offices" means two of your offices have nothing this metric can be computed from yet. Rows at full coverage say nothing.

A row with no industry reference and no network value yet reads "Cohort building. Peer data appears once it clears the consent + sample threshold" instead of a blank row.

Cards vs. Table. A Cards/Table switch in the top-right of the tab toggles the layout: Cards groups rows by category with the distribution strip described above; Table is the same rows in a dense sortable-by-scan grid (Metric, You, Peer, Delta, Cohort bar, Depth) for scanning many metrics at once. "Depth" describes how deep the industry side is in words, never as a count.

Drilling in. Tap any row to open its full detail. The overlay shows the distribution chart again at full size, and, because this is the HQ frame, an Across Your Offices panel: every office that has reported this metric, named, ranked best to worst, colored green if it sits in the strongest quartile of your network and red if it sits in the weakest, alongside the industry median as a single reference line. Swipe left or right (or use the arrow keys) to move to the next metric without closing the overlay.

The Carriers & TPAs tab

The network's read on how every carrier and TPA counterparty behaves: how each one pushes back, responds, pays, and rates, across your whole network's claim history with them.

Standouts row. A slim ribbon along the top names the network's most notable counterparty on each of four lenses: toughest pushback, approves most, answers fastest, and pays fastest, plus top rated. Each names the party and its number; tap one to open that party's profile.

The league table. Below the standouts, every carrier and TPA with at least one benchmark value is ranked in a sortable table. An All / Carriers / TPAs switch narrows the list. Columns:

• Carrier / TPA, the party's name and a Carrier or TPA tag.
• Gives jobs, a market-presence read (a research-backed tier, not a peer number), how much claim work this party tends to route to restoration contractors.
• Pushback, the share of submitted dollars this party doesn't approve. Lower is better.
• Approval, the share it does approve. Higher is better.
• Responds in, median days to first response. Lower is better.
• Pays in, median days to payment. Lower is better.
• Cycle time, median days from assignment to closeout. Lower is better.
• Peer rating, the network's own satisfaction rating for that party (out of 5).

Tap a column header to sort by it (the default sort is Pushback, so the toughest counterparties surface first); tap any row to open that party's full profile, which reads the same way an individual operator's own Carriers & TPAs drill-in does. The league shows its top rows first, with a Show all link if the full list runs longer.

If your network has no carrier or TPA data yet, the tab reads "The carrier and TPA league fills in as the scored catalog and peer cohorts grow." If parties exist in the catalog but none has cleared enough benchmark data to rank, it reads "Carrier and TPA benchmarks appear here as the cohort grows. Approval, pushback, payment speed, and ratings fill in once enough peers report on each party."

The Materials tab

The market's per-unit material prices, the same catalog every operator's IQ reads, grouped into families (drywall and finishing, paint and coatings, and the rest) so you open the group you care about instead of scrolling one long list. Each material renders through the same row design as the Benchmarks tab: a distribution strip, a Network value column, and a drill-in with the office-by-office ranking.

Until invoice data has flowed in from enough of the network's offices, the tab reads: "The market's per-unit material prices appear here as invoices flow in, each shown as the peer distribution with your own median price marked."

The Industry Data tab

Published macro and industry series, sourced and dated, organized into six categories in the order most relevant to a restoration business: Demand (is work coming), Labor (the biggest cost line), Input Costs (material costs), Insurance & Claims (the environment you get paid in), Economy (the macro backdrop), and Weather & Catastrophe (episodic context).

Each indicator renders as a card: its label, its current value, a small dated trend chart, and a flag when it's reading meaningfully out of its normal range. A bell icon lets you watch any indicator. Cards vs. list view is available the same way as the Benchmarks tab. Sources for each series live inside the drill-in overlay, not on the card grid, tap a card to open it and read where the number comes from and how it's trending.

This is public reference data, published macro and industry series, not network-specific. It's shown to give your leadership team the same market backdrop context every operator sees, without pulling in any office's private numbers.

Vendor and Equipment Intelligence

Peer reviews and the Verinode Research Score on every rate-able entity in the network's catalog: vendors (split into Software and Services), Processes, Equipment, and Clients (Carriers and TPAs).

Landing page. Five tiles, one per entity type, each showing how many items exist in that catalog. Tap a tile to open it.

Category grid. Inside a type, items are grouped into category tiles (for example, within Software: Estimating, Job Management, and so on), each showing how many items sit in that category and how many are rated or Verinode-scored.

Category detail. Inside a category, vendors and services render in a rich table: a compare checkbox (select up to four to open a side-by-side comparison), the vendor name, Verinode Score, Peer Rating, and Team Rating columns. On HQ, Team Rating stays empty, it's an individual operator's own internal team review, not something a network aggregate carries. Processes and Equipment render as simpler rating tables when peer data exists; where peer ratings haven't accumulated yet, the category falls back to a plain browse of the research catalog for that type (so the full researched set, air movers, dehus, HEPAs, generators, and the rest, stays visible even before ratings arrive) instead of an empty screen.

Empty network-wide. If nothing across the whole catalog, ratings, Verinode scores, and the base catalog itself, has any data yet, the tab reads: "No rated entities have cleared cohort minimums yet. Items appear here once 3+ operators have rated the same vendor / process / equipment item, or once a vendor's data passes the Verinode Research Score density threshold."

HQ reads every peer rating and Verinode Research Score across the whole network's catalog, the same catalog operators rate into on their own IQ, but HQ itself doesn't submit ratings. That stays an individual operator action.

The Analyst Reports tab

Restoration Software Intelligence Reports and field analysis published by Verinode Research. The newest report (or newest editorial piece if no reports have published yet) leads as a full-width hero cover; the rest fill two grids underneath, Reports · Restoration Software Intelligence and Editorial · Field Analysis.

Tap any cover to open the full article: title, synopsis, the complete body, and its sources. HQ network accounts read every published article at full strength, there's no premium-tier blur here (some individual Contributor-tier operators see a blurred body with an upgrade prompt on premium-visibility research; that gate doesn't apply to HQ).

Before Verinode Research has published anything, the tab reads: "No published research yet. Restoration Software Intelligence Reports and field analysis land here as Verinode Research publishes them."

The Industry News tab

A dense bento-style feed of Verinode research, industry articles, podcasts, vendor releases, and franchise updates. Filter chips at the top let you narrow to All or Verinode (items published by Verinode Research specifically), each with a count. Tap any tile to open the full item.

Before anything has published to the feed, it reads: "No items in the feed yet. Verinode research, industry articles, podcasts, vendor releases, and franchise updates land here as they publish."

How to use it

1. 1Start on the Benchmarks tab and scan the categories most relevant to what you're deciding this week, Profitability and Cash Velocity for a financial review, Service Speed and Safety ahead of a compliance check-in.
2. 2Drill into any row that shows your network trailing the industry reference (a red dot). The Across Your Offices panel names which specific offices are pulling the network average down and which are strongest, that's the coaching conversation.
3. 3Switch to Carriers & TPAs before a renewal or an escalation with a specific counterparty, sort by Pushback or Pays in to see where that party actually sits across your network's claim history with them.
4. 4Check Materials when material costs are a topic on an ops call, the network's median price by family shows whether a spike is isolated or industry-wide.
5. 5Use Industry Data to bring market context into a leadership meeting, cite the actual published series rather than a gut feel about where housing starts or claims frequency are trending.
6. 6Browse Ratings and Analyst Reports when evaluating a new vendor category or preparing guidance for your offices, both reflect the same peer intelligence individual operators already lean on.

Related articles

• HQ overview, orientation to the HQ sidebar and what each section covers.
• Network health, the office-standing leaderboard and internal network operations read.
• HQ programs, how network-wide vendor and carrier programs connect to what you see benchmarked here.
• HQ compliance, how certification and safety metrics feed into network standing.

Data sources