Network signal cards: what the network is telling you
Every restoration franchise operator running Verinode IQ gets signals: findings the platform detects in that operator's own data (a slowing carrier, a margin drift, a certification about to lapse).…
On this page
- What a network signal card is
- Where to find it
- How a network signal becomes a card
- Anatomy of a card
- The "X of Y franchisees" framing, explained
- Severity: info, warning, critical
- Interaction status: Act, Not Now, Ignore
- Escalating critical signals to your team
- Empty state
- The privacy boundary, in practice
- Related articles
What a network signal card is
Every restoration franchise operator running Verinode IQ gets signals: findings the platform detects in that operator's own data (a slowing carrier, a margin drift, a certification about to lapse). Those signals never leave the operator's account. What HQ sees instead is a different, network-level layer: a pattern that shows up across a meaningful share of the locations in your network at once. When that happens, Verinode writes one row to the network signal table and it surfaces on your Feed as a card.
A network signal card never names which franchisee, which job, or which client is behind it. It tells you what is happening, how many locations it touches out of how many, and how serious it is. Drilling into an individual location's private data is not part of this surface, by design. HQ works in aggregates and rankings; the franchisee owns the underlying detail.
Where to find it
Open Feed from the HQ sidebar, at hq.verinode.ai/feed. It is the same feed shell IQ operators use, reflowed for a network audience: instead of one operator's own findings, the stream is built from network signals, broadcasts you have sent, decision-plan activity, and industry content, merged into one scrollable deck of cards you page through one at a time.
Across the top of the page sit three filter pills, All, Decisions, Content, Events. Network signal cards live under Decisions (they render as the same "Decision" card type IQ uses) as well as under All. Beneath the pills, a time-range rail lets you widen or narrow the window: Today, This week, 30 days (the default), or All time.
How a network signal becomes a card
Network signals live in a table Verinode calls the network rollup, one row per detected pattern, scoped to your group. A background job refreshes them daily: it reads what is happening across every active location in your network and, when the same underlying issue (a slowing payment trend from a carrier, a margin metric drifting the wrong way, a compliance gap, a staffing shortfall) shows up across a meaningful share of your active locations rather than one or two, it writes (or updates) a signal for the whole network to see. A single location having a bad week does not produce a network signal. A pattern repeating across a real slice of the network does.
Each signal carries:
- A title and a body, both written in plain language, e.g. a title like "Short-staffed at several locations" with a body explaining what that means and why it matters.
- A domain (compliance, operations, margin, team, vendors, reputation, and so on), which Verinode uses behind the scenes to route the signal to your Focus Areas (see below), but which is never printed as a raw label on the card itself.
- A severity: info, warning, or critical.
- An affected count and a total count, the two numbers behind the "X of Y" framing described next.
- A status: new, seen, resolved, or dismissed, tracked on the signal itself as your team works through the feed.
The Feed page projects each of these rows into a card. Nothing about how a franchisee's own account looks or what their own signals say leaks through this path: the network signal only ever carries the rolled-up count and the pattern description.
Note
Network signals are lagging-and-leading by design: some fire once a pattern has already spread across a real share of the network (the fire already spreading), and others are trend-based, catching a metric moving the wrong way before it turns into a crisis. Either way, what lands on your Feed is always the network-level read, never a single location's raw numbers.
Anatomy of a card
- 1Source line. Every network signal card is authored by Verinode IQ, the same detection engine that runs signals for each franchisee's own account, so the small circular mark and "Verinode IQ" label next to the timestamp are the same ones you would see on an individual operator's feed. The timestamp reads relative time (for example "3h" or "2d") measured from when the signal was last detected.
- 2Type badge. The pill in the top right reads Decision, Verinode's umbrella label for anything that asks for a read and a call, whether that call belongs to an individual operator or to your network.
- 3Severity line. A small colored dot plus a word: Critical, Warning, or Info. This is the same severity carried on the underlying signal row and it drives two things: the dot's color, and whether the card gets pinned (see Ordering below).
- 4Title. The plain-language headline of the pattern, written by the detector that found it, for example "Staffing gaps cap the jobs a location can take" or "Decisions going unactioned across the network."
- 5The "X of Y" line. Directly under the title, the card's body opens with how many locations are affected out of how many are active in your network right now, followed by the fuller explanation of the pattern. This is the network framing at its most literal: a count, not a name.
- 6Action row. Three buttons: Act, Not Now, and Ignore.
Two things a network signal card never shows: a dollar figure and a specific recommendation. Those belong to the per-operator decision cards on the IQ side, where Verinode has a single business's real numbers to price an action against. A network signal is a pattern across many businesses, so the card stays at the level of "this is happening, here is how widespread it is."
The "X of Y franchisees" framing, explained
The affected/total pair is the single most important number on the card, because it is doing the job that a per-location breakdown can't: telling you how big the problem is without telling you who has it.
- Total is the count of active locations in your network the pattern was evaluated against.
- Affected is how many of those locations are currently inside the pattern (short-staffed, running a slow carrier, past due on a certification, whatever the signal is tracking).
Read it as a share, not a headcount. Three of six locations is a much bigger story than three of sixty, even though the raw number is identical, and the card is written so you catch that instantly, not after doing the math yourself. If the underlying detection didn't have both counts available when the signal was written, the card falls back to just the plain-language body text, no partial or estimated ratio is ever shown.
Severity: info, warning, critical
Every network signal carries one of three severities, each rendered with its own dot color on the card:
- Critical (the red dot): Reserve your attention here first: critical cards are pinned to the top of the Feed regardless of how old they are, so a critical signal from ten days ago that nobody has acted on will not get buried under a week of routine traffic.
- Warning (the yellow dot): Something worth a look, not yet urgent.
- Info (the green dot): Lower-stakes pattern or a status update.
Below critical, cards are ordered by how closely their business domain matches the Focus Areas you have set for your network (Compliance & risk, Adoption & operations, Margin & cash, People & labor, Vendors & equipment, Reputation), and then by recency. Tuning your focus areas never hides a signal, it only changes which ones surface first. Every network signal, regardless of domain, still appears on the Feed.
Interaction status: Act, Not Now, Ignore
Every network signal card carries an interaction status that tracks where your team is on working through it.
- Act opens the signal so your team can work it, and once tapped, a small status label appears next to the source line while it's in motion. Unlike a piece of content or a plan step, a network signal card does not vanish the moment you act on it; it stays visible with that status showing, because the whole network watching one card resolve is part of the point.
- Not Now opens a short reason picker: Too busy, Need more info, Not convinced, or Other. Picking one parks the card. A "Parked, this will resurface later" confirmation appears with an Undo link for a few seconds if you tapped it by mistake.
- Ignore dismisses the card outright. A brief "Dismissed" confirmation with an Undo link appears before the card leaves the deck for good.
Every one of these choices is reversible in the moment through the Undo link that appears right after you tap it. Once that window passes, the card is gone from the active deck (Ignore) or set aside to come back later (Not Now).
Escalating critical signals to your team
When there are open critical signals on your Feed, a floating Escalate N critical button appears in the top right of the page (N is however many critical signals are currently open). Tapping it opens a composer:
- Recipient email: a free-form email field. Verinode does not yet store which regional manager owns which cluster of locations, so you type in whoever should receive this batch.
- Intro: an editable message, pre-filled with a default asking the recipient to look into the listed signals and report back.
- A list of every critical signal that will be included, each with its title and its "X of Y locations" count.
Compose escalation email builds a plain email (through your own mail client) with one line per critical signal, listing the title, the affected/total count, and the signal's body text, so the recipient sees the full list in one place without you retyping any of it. Cancel closes the composer without sending anything.
Empty state
If your Feed has nothing new to show, whether that's because no network signals are open right now or because you have scrolled through everything in the current time window, you'll reach a closing card that reads:
All caught up Verinode IQ is continuously analyzing your data and scanning industry sources. New decisions, insights, and updates will appear here as they surface. Check back soon. Your next briefing is building.
If you have a filter or time range selected that matches nothing (for example, Decisions with Today and no signals detected in the last 24 hours), the deck instead shows a simple "No items match this filter" card. Widening the time range or switching back to All time is usually the fix.
The privacy boundary, in practice
A network signal card is built so that it structurally cannot carry a franchisee's identity: the underlying data has no location name attached to it, only a count of how many locations out of how many active ones are affected. Compare that to the handful of other card types that do appear on your Feed, like a franchisee accepting or declining a data-sharing request, where a location's name is deliberately shown, but only after it has been run through Verinode's anonymization layer for franchisees who have not opted to share their identity plainly with HQ. Network signal cards never go through that path at all, because they never carry a name to anonymize in the first place. This is the same boundary that runs through every part of HQ: your network's aggregates, rankings, and patterns are yours to see and act on; a single franchisee's business detail stays theirs.