Hard-recoverable vs soft-conditional: why the two dollar numbers never merge

What this article covers

The Impact section rolls up, across your entire network, the value Verinode | IQ has produced for your franchisees. Every dollar figure on that page falls into one of two registers: hard-recoverable (realized) or soft-conditional (potential). Verinode never adds these two numbers together into a single headline. This article explains what each register means, where the split comes from, and how to read every number on the Impact page without accidentally treating "recovered" and "potential" as the same kind of dollar.

Where to find it

Open Impact from the HQ sidebar. It sits in the Intelligence group alongside Benchmarks, Margin & Cash, and Forecasting, at hq.verinode.ai/impact. This group is always shown in the sidebar rather than folded, because these are the network's read on the business.

Impact is a network rollup, not a per-franchisee ledger. It reads a nightly summary table that a background job refreshes for every membership in your network, then joins each row to that franchisee's display name from your membership directory. HQ never queries a franchisee's underlying business records to build this page: it reads only the pre-aggregated rollup, which is the same privacy boundary that holds across every HQ surface. Franchisees own their data. HQ sees network aggregates and rankings, never a single membership's raw signals, ledger entries, or documents.

Why the two numbers never merge

Every dollar-shaped signal Verinode surfaces for a franchisee gets classified into exactly one of two registers the moment it is recorded, and that classification travels with it all the way up to this network page:

• Hard-recoverable. Dollars behind things like a supplement left on the table, a vendor price sitting above the peer median, an equipment-utilization gap, or billing leakage caught before it went out the door. These are underwrite-able: Verinode can point to the specific job, invoice, or line item behind the number, and the number gets counted once the franchisee actually acted on the decision.
• Soft-conditional. Dollars behind things like a compliance fine avoided, cert-gated revenue, a recruiting or cycle-time improvement, or a safety-incident avoided. These are directional, not underwritten. They describe what tends to be true across similar situations, not a specific dollar Verinode can trace to one transaction.

A hard dollar and a soft dollar answer two different questions ("what did we recover" vs. "what could this be worth"), so adding them produces a number that answers neither question and looks bigger than either fact supports. That is why every dollar total on the Impact page, and on the operator-side IQ Impact view it mirrors, keeps the two registers in separate fields and separate visual treatments rather than summing them into one figure. If you ever see a design, an export, or a conversation that adds "Recovered" to "Potential" into one number, that is a bug, not a feature: report it rather than repeating the total.

The hero row

At the top of the page, a single large number anchors the whole view: decisions acted on across the network in the current window (the eyebrow above it reads "Network impact · last 30 days"). Under it, a pill reads either the count of franchisees who produced measurable impact this window ("X of Y franchisees active") or, if the rollup has no data at all yet, "No data yet."

A line of supporting text spells the headline out in words, for example "14 decisions acted on across the network · $8.2k recovered · 31 IQ commands run." To the right, three secondary figures sit side by side, each with its own label and a one-line explanation underneath:

• Recovered, the network total of hard-recoverable dollars, labeled "Hard-recoverable (realized)" underneath.
• Potential, the network total of soft-conditional dollars, labeled "Soft-conditional" underneath.
• Action rate, the percentage of surfaced decisions that were acted on network-wide, labeled "Decisions acted vs surfaced" underneath. This number turns green when at least half of surfaced decisions were acted on, holds neutral between a quarter and a half, and turns to the Analyse (amber-red) tone below that, so a network that is sitting on unacted decisions is visible at a glance.

Dollar figures are compact-formatted: under a thousand dollars shows as a whole number, a thousand or more shows as "$X.Xk", and a million or more shows as "$X.XM". These are the same two registers as everywhere else on the page: Recovered and Potential sit next to each other, never combined.

Empty state. If no franchisee has a snapshot row yet, the hero reads "No data yet" and the supporting line explains: "Impact will appear as franchisees act on decisions, run IQ, and capture recoverable dollars. The nightly rollup fills this in." This is not a broken page, it means the nightly rollup has not produced a snapshot for any membership in your network yet, either because the network is new or because no franchisee has acted on a decision, run an IQ command, or added a document in the current window.

Value Captured row

This row ranks franchisees by realized hard-recoverable dollars, highest first, up to eight tiles. Each tile shows:

• The franchisee's name as the headline.
• The hard-recoverable dollar figure as the tile's primary label.
• A sub-line: if the franchisee also has soft-conditional dollars this window, it reads "$X recovered · $Y potential"; if there is no soft-conditional figure yet, it reads "$X recovered · N acted" (the count of decisions acted on).
• A small two-segment bar underneath, when there is any dollar value at all: the filled segment is the hard-recoverable share, the lighter segment beside it is the soft-conditional share. The bar is a visual split, not a stacked total, it exists so you can see the relative weight of realized vs. potential value for that franchisee at a glance, not to imply the two segments sum to one number.

Only franchisees with a hard-recoverable or soft-conditional dollar figure greater than zero appear here. Clicking any tile opens that franchisee's record on the Franchisees page.

Empty state. "No recoverable or potential dollars captured across the network yet. Value appears here as franchisees act on dollar-tagged decisions."

Needs Attention row

This row surfaces franchisees graded underutilized, Verinode's enablement list for HQ: the memberships whose IQ engagement is lightest right now, worth a check-in or a nudge rather than a scorecard. Up to eight tiles, sorted so the franchisees with the fewest decisions acted on come first. Each tile shows:

• "Underutilized" as the tile's label, in the Analyse (amber-red) tone.
• The franchisee's name as the headline.
• A sub-line reading "X of Y decisions acted" when the franchisee had any decisions surfaced this window, or "No IQ activity this window" when they had none at all.
• A small marker-line preview showing the franchisee's action rate against a midpoint reference, when decisions were surfaced.

Verinode grades every franchisee's utilization from their action rate (decisions acted vs. surfaced) and how many minutes they were active in IQ during the window. A franchisee grades strong when both their action rate and their active time clear a high bar; steady when either one clears a lower bar on its own; and underutilized when neither does. This is a heuristic tuned for the shape of usage in a franchisee's first 30 days on the platform, not a judgment about effort. A franchisee who is genuinely busy in the field but has not yet logged into IQ this window will grade underutilized the same as one who is disengaged, so treat this list as a prompt to check in, not a verdict.

Empty state. "No underutilized franchisees. Every active location is acting on decisions or engaging with IQ."

Engagement row

This row ranks franchisees by IQ commands run this window, highest first, up to eight tiles, the network's read on engagement depth rather than dollar value. Each tile shows:

• The command count as the tile's label ("N commands").
• The franchisee's name as the headline.
• A sub-line reading "N IQ commands · M survey responses" when the franchisee also responded to any surveys this window, or "N IQ commands run" otherwise.

Only franchisees with at least one IQ command run this window appear here. Clicking a tile opens that franchisee's record on the Franchisees page, same as the other two rows.

Empty state. "No operator-initiated IQ commands across the network this window."

The 30-day window

Every number on this page (decisions surfaced/acted, hard-recoverable and soft-conditional dollars, IQ commands, survey responses, active minutes, and the utilization grade) is computed over a rolling 30-day window and refreshed nightly. There is no picker to widen or narrow the window from this page: it always reflects the trailing 30 days as of the last refresh. If a franchisee's numbers look stale, the network refresh runs on a schedule rather than on demand, so a very recent burst of activity may not show up until the next nightly pass.

What HQ can and cannot see here

Impact is built entirely from a network summary table: one row per membership, refreshed nightly from that franchisee's own decision, dollar, IQ-usage, document, and survey activity, then joined only to that franchisee's display name. HQ never runs a query against a franchisee's underlying jobs, invoices, signals, or documents to build this page, and cannot drill from a dollar figure here into the transaction behind it. If you need the detail behind a franchisee's numbers, that conversation belongs to the franchisee, inside their own IQ account, where the same hard/soft split is visible with full underlying context.

Using this page

Read the hero row first for the network-level shape: is the network's action rate healthy, and which register (recovered or potential) is doing more of the work right now. Then use Value Captured to see which franchisees are converting decisions into realized dollars, Needs Attention to find memberships worth a proactive check-in before a light-engagement pattern becomes a churn risk, and Engagement to see who is actually running IQ day to day, independent of whether their decisions have produced dollars yet. A franchisee can appear on Engagement without appearing on Value Captured: running commands and responding to surveys is real usage even before it produces a recoverable dollar.

Related reading

• /help/hq-overview for how the HQ sidebar and privacy boundary work across every section.
• /help/network-health for the network's operational and financial health signals alongside Impact.
• /help/hq-benchmarks for how franchisee-vs-franchisee comparisons are gated and displayed.
• /help/hq-report-library for exporting network rollups, including Impact, into shareable reports.

Data sources