"How franchisees are graded: strong, steady, underutilized"

What this grade is

Every franchisee on your network gets a single-word read on how much they're actually using Verinode IQ: Strong, Steady, or Underutilized. It is not a benchmark score, a compliance score, or a judgment on how well a franchisee is running their business. It answers one narrower question: over the last 30 days, is this franchisee acting on what IQ finds for them, and are they actually spending time in the app.

The grade is the same computation Verinode already runs for each franchisee on their own IQ Impact page (see The Impact hero for that surface), reused so the network view never drifts from what the franchisee sees for themselves. HQ does not read a franchisee's jobs, invoices, or private records to produce it. It reads two numbers a franchisee's own account already produces about itself and rolls the same two numbers up to a network table. This article is about the math and how it drives the Needs Attention row on the Impact page. For the full page tour, hero numbers, and the other two tile rows, read Impact: the network's return on Verinode first if you haven't already.

Where to find it

The grade itself is not shown as a standalone column or filter. It surfaces in two places:

• The Needs Attention row on the Impact page, under the Intelligence group in the HQ sidebar at hq.verinode.ai/franchise/impact. Every tile in that row is a franchisee currently graded Underutilized.
• On the mobile HQ app, the Reporting tile in the Impact rollup carries a support line reading, for example, "6 strong · 3 underutilized," a direct count of how many franchisees on your roster hold each grade this window. Steady franchisees are the remainder: total minus strong minus underutilized.

There is no page where you can browse all franchisees sorted by grade, and no export that lists "Strong" franchisees by name outside these two surfaces. The grade exists to power the one list that matters operationally, the one you'd actually work from: who needs a call this week.

The two inputs

Two numbers feed the grade, both measured over the same window:

• Action rate. The share of decisions Verinode surfaced to that franchisee in the window that they actually acted on: decisions acted, divided by decisions surfaced. If Verinode surfaced 14 decisions and the franchisee acted on 6 of them, the action rate is about 43%. If nothing was surfaced at all, the action rate is treated as 0, not left undefined, so a franchisee with an empty account doesn't accidentally clear a threshold by having no denominator.
• Active minutes. Time the franchisee's team actually spent signed in and using IQ during the window, tracked independently of which page they were on. This is a measure of engagement with the tool itself, separate from whether any of that time produced an acted decision.

Both numbers are the same two inputs the franchisee's own Impact hero shows them under the Acted tile's action-rate note and the Time With IQ tile. Nothing about the grade depends on dollars recovered, IUs spent, documents uploaded, or survey activity: those are real signals shown elsewhere on the Impact page, but the utilization grade itself is action rate and active minutes only.

The thresholds

The grade is evaluated as a cascade, checked in this order, first match wins:

1. Strong. Action rate is at least 50%, and active minutes are at least 180 (three hours) in the window.
2. Steady. Action rate is at least 25%, or active minutes are at least 60 (one hour), but the franchisee didn't clear the Strong bar above.
3. Underutilized. Neither condition above is met.

Two-thirds of the way through the current 30-day window, a franchisee's grade can and does move. It's a snapshot, not a running total: if a franchisee doubles down on decisions in the back half of the month, next night's rollup can lift them from Underutilized to Steady or higher.

How it's computed and refreshed

The grade is not computed live when you open the Impact page. A nightly rollup reads each franchisee's own last-30-days metrics (a fixed rolling window ending "now," not a calendar month) and writes one row per franchisee into a network-level summary table, including their utilization grade for that run. HQ's Impact page reads that table, never a franchisee's live account. Because the window is a rolling 30 days measured at the moment the cron runs, it's an independent calculation from whatever window a franchisee happens to have selected on their own Impact page ("This month," "Last 30 days," "Year to date," or "All time"): the two can show close but not identical figures, since HQ's number is always the trailing-30-day slice, refreshed once a day.

If the underlying summary table hasn't run yet for your network, for example the day a network first comes onto HQ, the Impact page shows its "No data yet" empty state rather than a false Underutilized read for everyone. See Impact: the network's return on Verinode for that empty state.

The same grade, two different words

One detail worth knowing if you ever compare notes with a franchisee directly: the underlying grade value is identical on both sides of the privacy boundary, but the word shown for the lowest tier is not.

• On a franchisee's own IQ Impact page, that tier is labeled "Warming up." It's coaching language for someone looking at their own account: a nudge, not a verdict.
• On the HQ Impact page's Needs Attention row, the same tier is labeled "Underutilized." HQ's job with this list is oversight and enablement across a whole roster, so the label says plainly what the data shows.

Strong and Steady read the same on both sides. Only the bottom tier's label changes, deliberately, based on who's looking at it.

How the grade drives Needs Attention

Needs Attention is the one row on the Impact page built entirely from this grade. It filters the whole franchisee roster down to only those graded Underutilized this window, franchisees graded Strong or Steady never appear here. Rows are sorted by fewest decisions acted first, so the most disengaged franchisees sit at the top of the list, capped at 8 tiles.

Each tile shows:

• The label "Underutilized."
• The franchisee's name as the headline.
• A sub-line reading, for example, "6 of 14 decisions acted" when Verinode surfaced at least one decision to that franchisee in the window, or "No IQ activity this window" when it didn't surface anything measurable at all.
• A small marker chart plotting the franchisee's action rate against a reference point, so you can see at a glance how far below a healthy pace that franchisee is running, not just that they're below it.

Clicking any tile opens that franchisee in the Franchisees directory, filtered to that location, so you can look at their fuller profile before you reach out.

Empty state. If every active franchisee on your roster is acting on decisions or engaging with IQ, meaning nobody currently grades Underutilized, the row reads: "No underutilized franchisees. Every active location is acting on decisions or engaging with IQ." That's the state you want to see. It doesn't mean the grading stopped running; it means nobody cleared the Underutilized bar this window.

Reading a franchisee's tile correctly

A franchisee showing "No IQ activity this window" on Needs Attention is a different situation from one showing "3 of 20 decisions acted." The first has nothing surfaced or nothing touched at all, worth a check on whether their data is flowing in the way it should. The second has real signals sitting in front of them that they're not acting on, worth a conversation about what's blocking them, workload, unclear value, or simply not knowing where to look on their own Impact page.

Neither reading is a scorecard on the franchisee's business performance. A franchisee can run an excellent, profitable location and still grade Underutilized here if their team isn't spending time in IQ or isn't closing the loop on what it surfaces. That's exactly why this list exists as a separate row from anything benchmark-related: it's about usage of the tool, not the health of the business behind it.

Best-practice example

Say your Needs Attention row shows five franchisees this week. Three read "No IQ activity this window," two read low fractions like "2 of 18 decisions acted." Start with the two showing real surfaced decisions going unactioned, they're the clearest, most immediate opportunity: something specific and dollar-tagged is sitting in their queue right now. Click through to each on the Franchisees page, then reach out directly rather than waiting for the grade to self-correct. For the three with no activity at all, that's a broader onboarding or engagement conversation rather than a single decision to point them at. Check back the next morning: a franchisee who acts on even a handful of their backlog can move off this list by the next nightly refresh.

Related reading

• Impact: the network's return on Verinode, the full Impact page tour: the hero, Value Captured, and Engagement rows
• The Impact hero: Decisions Acted and IQ utilization, the operator-side view of this same grade, labeled "Warming up" instead of "Underutilized"
• The location directory, where every Needs Attention tile sends you when you click through
• Network Health, the network's day-to-day operating-health composite, a different signal from usage
• Recent Activity, roster activity such as signups and invites, distinct from IQ usage