Materials on HQ: your network's supplier-price intelligence

What the Materials section is

Materials is HQ's read on what your network pays for the physical goods that go into a job: drywall, paint, fasteners, lumber, insulation, roofing, floor coverings, tile, site protection, cleaning chemicals, restoration consumables, PPE, and fleet build-out. Every figure on the page is a per-unit price (per gallon, per sheet, per square foot, per bundle, and so on), rolled up across every location in your network and set beside the cohort median, the typical price the wider Verinode network pays for that same material.

This is not a purchase order log, an invoice viewer, or a vendor catalog. Verinode does not show HQ any one location's individual purchases here. It reads the supplier invoice data your locations have already connected, computes a network-wide median price per material, and compares that median to what operators outside your network pay for the identical item. The page exists to answer one question for leadership: is the network overpaying for materials, and if so, on which items, and by how much.

Verinode surfaces the price, the cohort reference, and the dollarized opportunity. It never decides what to do about a gap, and it never tells you which single location is behind a number. Sourcing and negotiation calls stay with you.

Where to find it

Open Materials from the HQ sidebar. It sits in the Operations group, after Vendors and Assets. The URL is hq.verinode.ai/materials.

The page is a single scrolling home, no tabs, built top to bottom from four rows: a hero band, Top opportunities, Spend by family, and All materials. None of the tiles on this page open a drill-in overlay today; they're built for scanning, not clicking.

Reading the hero

The top of the page is a single hero band. Nothing here sits inside a card frame, it's the numbers directly on the page:

• Eyebrow: "Network Material Prices."
• Headline: the count of materials your network has enough data to benchmark, the same number of rows that populate further down the page.
• Pill: once the network has at least one material family with a real savings opportunity, a pill reads "Top opportunity: [family name]" (for example, "Top opportunity: Roofing & Exterior"), naming the family where the network's total dollar opportunity is largest. No pill shows until a family clears that bar.
• Sub-line: before any materials have cleared the reporting bar, it reads verbatim: "Network material prices appear here as your locations' supplier invoices come in." Once materials are populating, it reads: "Your network pays above the industry cohort on [X] of [Y] materials. Closing the gaps is worth about [$Z] a year," giving you the whole page's headline read in one sentence before you scroll further.

Three secondary figures sit beside the headline:

• Network Spend ("Trailing 12 Months"), the network's total annual spend across every benchmarked material, in dollars.
• Above Cohort ("Of [Y] Materials"), how many of your benchmarked materials the network pays more for than the cohort median. This figure is colored to draw attention when it's above zero.
• Savings Opportunity ("Per Year At Cohort Median"), the total annual dollar difference if every above-cohort material moved down to the cohort's median price. Read this as a ceiling, the number if every gap fully closed, not a forecast of what will actually happen.

Top opportunities

Below the hero, Top opportunities surfaces up to six materials where the network is paying meaningfully more than the cohort, ranked by dollar opportunity, largest first. Each tile reads as a sentence: "Your network pays [$X] per [unit] for [material name]. The cohort median is [$Y]." Underneath, a line gives the estimated annual dollar impact across the network ("Worth about [$Z] a year across the network"), and a footer names how many of your locations buy that material ("[N] locations buying").

If no material has an opportunity yet, the row reads verbatim: "No material savings opportunities found yet. They appear as locations contribute invoices and cohorts form."

Spend by family

Spend by family rolls every benchmarked material up into its material family: Drywall & Finishing, Paint & Coatings, Fasteners, Lumber & Sheet Goods, Insulation, Roofing & Exterior, Floor Coverings, Tile & Masonry, Site Protection, Cleaning Chemicals, Restoration Consumables, PPE, Fleet Build-out, and an "Other Materials" catch-all for anything uncategorized. Families are ordered by dollar opportunity first, total spend second, so whichever family is costing the network the most sits first.

Each tile shows the family's name, its total annual network spend, and, when that family carries a real opportunity, a note underneath reading "~[$X] a year opportunity." Families with no opportunity just read "network spend." If your network has no family-level spend yet, this row doesn't render at all.

All materials

All materials is the full list, every material that has cleared the reporting bar, in the same opportunity-ranked order as Top opportunities (the biggest gaps lead; this is not an alphabetical list). Each tile shows the material's name, your network's median unit price, and one of two sub-lines:

• "above cohort [$Y]" when the network is paying more than the cohort median for that item
• "at or below cohort [$Y]" when it isn't

If a material has no cohort reference yet to compare against, its sub-line falls back to a plain unit label instead, such as "per Gallon," "per Sheet," or "per Square."

Before any invoice data has flowed in, this row reads verbatim: "Network materials appear here as your locations' supplier invoices come in."

How the numbers are built, and the privacy boundary

Every figure on this page comes from your own locations' connected supplier invoice data, aggregated centrally. HQ never reads one location's invoices directly through this page, and no page on this section shows a location-by-location breakdown of what any single location pays.

Two protections sit underneath every row:

• A single-location price never becomes a network row. A material bought by only a handful of your locations is held back from the page entirely rather than shown at a thin cohort, because a price attached to a near-single-location group would effectively identify that location's own purchasing by elimination. As more of your locations buy a given material, it clears that bar and the row appears on its own, with no action needed from HQ.
• The cohort median is anonymized, cross-network reference data. The "cohort" price your network is compared against is not a named competitor or a count of who's behind it. It's a median computed from operator invoice data across the wider Verinode network, filtered to operators outside your own network, with the same anonymization and minimum-contributor floor that protects every peer benchmark on the platform. You get one number, a typical price, never a name and never a headcount.

This is the same trust boundary that governs every HQ surface: franchisees own their data, and HQ sees network patterns, never a single location's private business. A gap between your network's median and the cohort's is a prompt to ask a question, not a scorecard on any one location, and Verinode never surfaces which location is paying which price behind a network row.

How to use it

1. 1Start at the hero. The "Above Cohort" count and the "Savings Opportunity" dollar figure tell you in one glance whether materials are worth raising on this month's ops call.
2. 2Open Top opportunities and read the leading tiles. They name the specific material, your network's price, and the cohort's price side by side, so you know exactly what to ask your buyers about before the call.
3. 3Check Spend by family ahead of a supplier negotiation. It tells you which category of material (roofing, drywall, paint) is worth spending negotiating time on, versus which is too small to matter.
4. 4Scan All materials for the full picture, including materials already priced at or below cohort, so you know what's already working and not only what's lagging.
5. 5Bring the specific material names and dollar gaps into your next ops or supplier conversation. The page gives you the number; the sourcing decision stays yours.

Best-practice example

Say the hero reads 18 materials benchmarked, "Above Cohort: 6 of 18," and a savings opportunity of about $94k a year, with a pill reading "Top opportunity: Roofing & Exterior." Open Top opportunities: the leading tile shows the network paying $1.42 per square foot for a shingle line against a cohort median of $1.18, worth roughly $38k a year across 9 locations buying. Spend by family confirms Roofing & Exterior carries the largest opportunity of any family, ahead of Drywall & Finishing. That's the specific, dollarized conversation to bring to your next supplier call, one material, one price gap, one number, rather than a general instruction to "cut material costs."

Related reading

• Vendors: your network's spend and procurement leverage, in aggregate, the sibling Operations surface for software, equipment rental, and contractor spend
• Network benchmarks: how the section works, including the Benchmarks hub's own thinner Materials pill
• HQ overview, orientation to the full HQ sidebar
• Network health, the internal office-standing view this page's privacy model shares
• Programs, where preferred-vendor and material-sourcing programs are defined
• Compliance, network-wide standing across every program type, not just materials or vendors

Data sources