"Reference: material families and unit labels"

What this reference is for

Every number on the HQ Materials page is a price for one physical item, in one unit, filed under one family. Behind the scenes, Verinode stores that family and that unit as a short lowercase token, for example drywall_finishing or SHEET, because a fixed, closed list is what lets Verinode roll thousands of supplier invoice lines from every location in your network up into one comparable number. What you see on screen is never that raw token. It is always the humanized label this article documents.

This is a reference, not a walkthrough. For how to read the Materials page itself, the hero, Top opportunities, Spend by family, and All materials, see Materials on HQ: your network's supplier-price intelligence. This article is the single place the two label systems that page depends on live together: the material-family taxonomy (its full list, its display order, and the accent color each family carries in a tile) and the unit-label map (the token-to-label conversion that keeps a raw unit code like GAL or LF off your screen). Once you know both, every tile on the page, and the matching Materials pill inside the Benchmarks hub, reads the same way.

Where you'll run into this taxonomy

• HQ Materials, from the HQ sidebar at hq.verinode.ai/materials. Every material tile on this page (Top opportunities, Spend by family, All materials) carries a family and a unit label built from the lists below.
• The Materials pill inside Benchmarks, at hq.verinode.ai/benchmarks. That pill groups the same per-unit-price metrics by family, in the family list's canonical display order, with the same unit labels on every row. See Network benchmarks: how the section works.
• Verinode IQ's own Materials tool, the operator-facing counterpart each of your locations sees for their own purchases. It draws on the identical family and unit labels, which is why a family name or a unit label means exactly the same thing whether you're reading it as a franchisee looking at your own invoices or as HQ looking at the network roll-up.

Nothing here is typed in free text by a franchisee or by HQ. A material's family and unit are set once, when Verinode canonicalizes a supplier invoice line against its material catalog, and stay fixed from there. The labels below are simply how those fixed values are humanized for display.

The material-family taxonomy

Thirteen families cover the catalog today, plus one catch-all for anything that doesn't match a family. Each family also carries a tile accent color, one of six named colors reused across the set, so that a row of family tiles reads as visually distinct groups rather than one flat list of names. This is the order families appear in wherever the page (or the Benchmarks Materials pill) groups by family rather than by dollar figure:

| Stored as | What you see | Tile accent | |---|---|---| | drywall_finishing | Drywall & Finishing | Copper | | paint_coatings | Paint & Coatings | Violet | | fasteners | Fasteners | Steel | | lumber_sheet_goods | Lumber & Sheet Goods | Amber | | insulation | Insulation | Teal | | roofing_exterior | Roofing & Exterior | Amber | | floor_coverings | Floor Coverings | Copper | | tile_masonry | Tile & Masonry | Steel | | site_protection | Site Protection | Teal | | cleaning_chemicals | Cleaning Chemicals | Violet | | restoration_consumables | Restoration Consumables | Green | | ppe | PPE | Green | | fleet_buildout | Fleet Build-out | Steel |

Anything that doesn't match one of the 13 tokens above, including a null or missing family, displays as Other Materials rather than a raw token or a blank. That fallback applies everywhere a family label is shown: the HQ Materials page, the Benchmarks Materials pill, and Verinode IQ's own Materials tool.

Two different sort orders, depending on the page. The order in the table above, the canonical display order, is what the Benchmarks Materials pill and Verinode IQ's own family groupings use. The HQ Materials page's own Spend by family row sorts differently: by dollar savings opportunity first, total network spend second, so whichever family is costing your network the most always leads that row, regardless of where it falls in the canonical list above. See Spend by family: rolling material prices up by category for that row specifically.

The unit-price label map

Every material price on the page is a price per unit, gallon, sheet, square foot, and so on. The catalog stores that unit as a short uppercase code. The table below is the full conversion Verinode applies before a unit ever reaches the screen:

| Stored as | What you see | |---|---| | GAL | Gallon | | SHEET | Sheet | | EA | Each | | BOX | Box | | LB | Pound | | ROLL | Roll | | SF | Sq Ft | | SQFT | Sq Ft | | SY | Sq Yd | | SQ | Square | | LF | Linear Ft | | QUART | Quart | | PAIL | Pail | | BAG | Bag | | TUBE | Tube | | BUNDLE | Bundle |

SF and SQFT both mean square foot and both display as Sq Ft, they're two different raw codes the catalog has picked up for the same real-world unit. If a price has no unit on file at all, it displays as the plain word unit rather than a blank or a dash. If a future material carries a code not yet in this list, Verinode falls back to a generic humanized version of that code rather than showing the raw database token verbatim, so a tile never reads a bare, unexplained code.

Wherever a per-unit price appears, on a Top opportunities tile, an All materials row, or a Benchmarks metric row, it's built as "per [unit label]", for example "per Sheet" or "per Sq Ft", using exactly the labels above.

How the two systems combine on a real tile

Take a Top opportunities tile reading: "Your network pays $1.42 per Sq Ft for a shingle line. The cohort median is $1.18." Two humanized layers are doing work in that one sentence: Sq Ft is the unit label (converted from the catalog's SF or SQFT code), and the tile itself is filed under the Roofing & Exterior family (converted from roofing_exterior), which is why it groups with other roofing and exterior materials in Spend by family and carries that family's Amber accent. Neither the unit code nor the family token is ever what reaches your screen, both are humanized before the tile renders.

The privacy boundary this reference sits inside

The families and units this article documents are neutral catalog metadata, they describe what a material is and how it's priced, not who bought it. They carry no location-identifying information on their own. The protection that keeps HQ from seeing a single location's private purchasing lives one layer up, in how many locations have to be buying a given material before its price is allowed to appear on the page at all. See Materials on HQ: your network's supplier-price intelligence for how that floor works and why a thin or missing row is normal, not a bug.

Related reading

• Materials on HQ: your network's supplier-price intelligence, the full walkthrough of the page this reference supports
• Top opportunities: the network's biggest material price gaps
• Spend by family: rolling material prices up by category
• Network benchmarks: how the section works, including the Benchmarks hub's own Materials pill
• Facilities taxonomy: types, ownership, statuses, and categories, the equivalent fixed-list reference for the Facilities section

Data sources