Spend by family: where the material budget goes

What Spend by family shows

The Materials page gives your network's leadership a per-material read on pricing: what your locations pay for drywall, paint, fasteners, and every other physical good that goes into a job, set beside what the wider Verinode network pays for the same item. Spend by family is the row on that page that steps back from individual materials and answers a coarser question: which category of material is actually carrying your network's dollars, and where is the savings opportunity concentrated once you stop looking material by material.

A material family is a group of related materials, drywall and joint compound both sit in Drywall & Finishing, felt underlayment and shingles both sit in Roofing & Exterior. Every material on the page belongs to exactly one family. Spend by family sums two things per family, across every material that belongs to it: your network's trailing 12-month spend, and the annual dollar savings opportunity if every above-cohort material in that family moved down to the cohort median price.

This is not a separate data source from the rest of the Materials page. It is the same per-material rollup, regrouped and re-summed by family, so the numbers here always tie back to the material-level rows below.

Where to find it

Open Materials from the HQ sidebar, under the Operations group, alongside Assets and Vendors. The URL is hq.verinode.ai/materials.

The page stacks four rows top to bottom:

1. The hero band (Network Material Prices, with the network spend, above-cohort count, and savings opportunity)
2. Top opportunities, up to six individual materials with the largest dollar gaps
3. Spend by family, this row
4. All materials, the full material list

Spend by family sits between the individual-material call-outs above it and the full material list below it. Read Materials tab: network material-cost benchmarks for the whole page; this article is the deep dive on the family row specifically.

What each tile shows

Spend by family renders as a horizontal row of tiles, one per family that has at least one qualifying material. Each tile shows:

• The family label, for example "Drywall & Finishing" or "Roofing & Exterior."
• The dollar value, bold: the family's total trailing-12-month network spend across every material in it.
• A sub-line, one of two things: if the family has a real savings opportunity, it reads "~$X a year opportunity," the dollar figure being that family's share of the annual savings-opportunity total. If the family has no savings opportunity (every material in it is already priced at or below the cohort median, or it has no cohort reference at all), the sub-line reads "network spend" instead.

There is no operator count, no per-location breakdown, and no click-through on these tiles. They are for scanning: which family is the biggest line, and which family is where the opportunity dollars are sitting.

How the dollar figures are formatted

Large numbers are shortened for readability, the same convention used across the Materials page:

• $1,000,000 and above shows as millions with one decimal, for example "$2.3M."
• $1,000 and above (below a million) shows as thousands with no decimals, for example "$84k."
• Under $10 shows with cents, for example "$4.25."
• Everything else shows as a whole dollar figure with comma separators, for example "$340."

A family with no dollar value at all (nothing has flowed in for anything in that family) shows a dash rather than "$0."

How the family and its two totals are built

Spend by family does not run its own query. It is built entirely from the same material list that feeds Top opportunities and All materials, the network's per-material rollup, already filtered down to materials that have cleared the network's cohort-reporting floor (see the privacy section below). For each material in that list:

1. Its family is read directly off the material (the same tag that groups Drywall & Finishing, Roofing & Exterior, and the rest).
2. Its annual network spend (trailing 12 months) is added to that family's running spend total.
3. Its annual savings opportunity, the dollar gap if the network's price on that material moved down to the cohort median, is added to that family's running opportunity total. Materials already at or below the cohort median contribute nothing to this side of the total.

Because every material's spend rolls into exactly one family, the family tiles are a complete partition of the same spend that feeds the hero's Network Spend figure at the top of the page: add up every tile's dollar value and it equals the hero's trailing-12-month total. The same is true on the opportunity side, add up every family's "~$X a year opportunity" line and it equals the hero's Savings Opportunity figure.

Family labels and the "Other Materials" catch-all

Verinode groups materials into thirteen named families:

| Family label | What it covers | |---|---| | Drywall & Finishing | Drywall board, joint compound, tape, texture | | Paint & Coatings | Paint, primer, sealants and coatings | | Fasteners | Screws, nails, and connector hardware | | Lumber & Sheet Goods | Framing lumber, plywood, OSB | | Insulation | Batt, blown, and rigid insulation | | Roofing & Exterior | Shingles, underlayment, exterior trim and siding | | Floor Coverings | Flooring materials and floor coverings | | Tile & Masonry | Tile, grout, and masonry materials | | Site Protection | Containment, plastic sheeting, protective site materials | | Cleaning Chemicals | Cleaning and restoration chemical products | | Restoration Consumables | General restoration consumables | | PPE | Personal protective equipment | | Fleet Build-out | Vehicle and fleet build-out materials |

A material that has not been mapped to any of these thirteen groups falls under Other Materials rather than being dropped from the page. If your network's spend is showing up under Other Materials more than you'd expect, it usually means a supplier's product description hasn't been matched to the shared catalog yet, not that Verinode is hiding it.

Ordering: opportunity first, not alphabetical

Family tiles are not shown in a fixed catalog order and not alphabetically. They are ranked by dollar savings opportunity first (the family with the largest annual opportunity leads), and by total spend as the tiebreaker for families with no opportunity or a tied one. This means the row reorders itself around what actually matters this month: the family costing your network the most in avoidable spend sits first, ahead of a family that simply has more total dollars flowing through it but no gap to close.

Color

Each family tile carries an accent color, the same accent used for that family everywhere else in the Materials product. Colors are assigned per family, not per rank, so a family keeps its color as the row reorders around it:

| Family | Accent | |---|---| | Drywall & Finishing | Copper | | Floor Coverings | Copper | | Paint & Coatings | Violet | | Cleaning Chemicals | Violet | | Fasteners | Steel | | Tile & Masonry | Steel | | Fleet Build-out | Steel | | Lumber & Sheet Goods | Amber | | Roofing & Exterior | Amber | | Insulation | Teal | | Site Protection | Teal | | PPE | Green | | Restoration Consumables | Green |

A few colors are shared across more than one family (Copper covers two families, Steel covers three, and so on). The palette exists to give the row visual variety and to keep a family visually consistent with its own tiles elsewhere on the page, not to make every family's color unique. Other Materials, having no family tag to look up, defaults to Copper.

Empty state

Spend by family has no placeholder message. If your network has no material with any qualifying spend yet, the row does not render at all, no empty tile, no "coming soon" text. It appears the moment at least one material clears the network's reporting floor and carries a spend figure, and it grows one tile at a time as more families qualify.

This is different from the rows above and below it on the page. Top opportunities and All materials both show an explanatory sentence when they're empty ("No material savings opportunities found yet…" and "Network materials appear here as your locations' supplier invoices come in.," respectively). Spend by family simply isn't there until it has something real to show.

The privacy boundary: what never reaches a family total

Every dollar figure on this row is a network-wide sum, never a single location's number, and two protections sit underneath it:

• A material bought by too few locations never reaches any family total. Before a material's spend and opportunity are added into its family's running totals, that material has to have cleared the network's minimum-contributor floor for individual materials, the same floor that keeps a single-location price off the material-level rows entirely. A material held below that floor contributes nothing to its family's spend figure or its family's opportunity figure, not a suppressed line item, an absent one. In a smaller network, or for a niche material only one or two locations buy, this means a family's total can understate what your network actually spends in that category, because the held-back material's dollars are excluded rather than folded in anonymously.
• The cohort reference behind every family's opportunity dollars is anonymized, cross-network data. The savings-opportunity share that rolls into a family total is built from a cohort median price, computed across the wider Verinode network with the same anonymization and minimum-contributor floor that protects every peer benchmark on the platform. You never see a name or a count of contributors behind that median, only the price.

Your own locations' names never appear on this row. It is family-level and network-level totals only, never a location-by-location breakdown. See What HQ sees: the network privacy boundary for how that floor works across the whole HQ product.

How to use it

1. 1Scan the row left to right. Because it's ranked by opportunity first, the leftmost tile with a "~$X a year opportunity" sub-line is the single family costing your network the most in avoidable spend.
2. 2Compare the opportunity family against the tiles with no opportunity ("network spend" only). A family with a large spend figure but no opportunity line is already priced competitively, it just isn't where a supplier conversation will move the needle.
3. 3Before a vendor or supplier negotiation, check whether the family you're about to negotiate shows an opportunity line here. If it does, open Top opportunities or All materials further down the page to find the specific material names and per-unit prices driving that family's gap.
4. 4Watch which families carry each color as the row reorders month to month. A family whose accent color you recognize moving from the middle of the row toward the front is a signal that a new gap has opened up in that category.
5. 5If a family you know your network buys heavily doesn't appear, or its total looks low, check that the materials in it have enough locations buying them to clear the network's reporting floor, rather than assuming spend in that category is genuinely small.

Related articles

• Materials tab: network material-cost benchmarks: the full Materials page this row lives on, including the hero, Top opportunities, and All materials.
• What HQ sees: the network privacy boundary: how the cohort floor and anonymization work across HQ.
• Network benchmarks: how the section works: the Benchmarks hub, which carries its own thinner Materials pill.
• HQ overview: orientation to the full HQ sidebar.

Data sources