Top opportunities: where your network overpays most

What this row is

Top opportunities is the second row on the HQ Materials page, sitting directly under the hero band. Where the hero gives you one headline sentence about the whole network, this row breaks that headline apart into the individual materials driving it: the specific items where your network's price sits furthest above what the broader Verinode cohort typically pays, each shown with its own dollar figure and how many of your locations are buying it.

Every other row on the Materials page (Spend by family, All materials) rolls the same underlying data up or lists it out in full. Top opportunities is the one row built purely to answer "what should I actually call someone about this month," ranked so the biggest dollar gap leads.

Verinode does not tell you which supplier to switch to or place the call for you. It reads your locations' connected supplier invoices, computes a network-wide median price per material, holds that against the cohort median (what operators outside your network typically pay for the same item), and ranks the gaps by dollars. The sourcing or negotiation decision is yours.

Where to find it

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

The page is a single scrolling home, no tabs. Top opportunities is the second row, appearing right after the hero band and before Spend by family and All materials.

What each tile shows

Each material that qualifies renders as a wide tile in ember red, the Analyse signal color used across the platform to mark something worth a closer look rather than a compliance emergency. The tile is built as a single sentence you can read without opening anything:

• Family label, a small caption at the top of the tile naming the material family the item belongs to (for example, Roofing & Exterior, Drywall & Finishing, Paint & Coatings).
• Headline sentence: "Your network pays [$X] per [unit] for [material name]. The cohort median is [$Y]." The unit is always written in plain English (per gallon, per sheet, per square foot, and so on), never a raw unit code, and the material name is the canonicalized item, not a raw invoice line description.
• Sub line: "Worth about [$Z] a year across the network," the dollarized annual opportunity for that one material.
• Meta line: "[N] location[s] buying," the count of your own locations whose invoices show them purchasing that material.

These tiles are for scanning, not clicking. There is no drill-in overlay behind a Top opportunities tile today, unlike the vendor or franchisee detail overlays elsewhere in HQ.

How the ranking and the dollar figure are built

Two things determine whether a material appears here at all, and where it lands:

1. It must have a real opportunity. A material only qualifies when your network's median unit price is above the cohort median, producing a positive annual savings figure. A material priced at or below the cohort median never appears in Top opportunities, no matter how much of it your network buys. That material still shows up in All materials further down the page, just without an opportunity note attached.
2. It's ranked by dollars, not by percentage or by spend. The annual savings figure for each material is the same one used everywhere on this page: the gap between your network's median price and the cohort median, multiplied by how much of that material the network buys in a year. A material where your network is only a little above the cohort median but buys a large volume of it can rank above a material with a much bigger per-unit gap but low volume, because the ranking is dollars-per-year at stake, not dollars-per-unit or percent-above-cohort.

The row shows up to six materials, the six largest annual dollar opportunities network-wide, in that order.

Reading this row against the hero

The hero band above this row carries a pill reading "Top opportunity: [family name]," naming the material family with the single largest summed dollar opportunity across the network. That pill and this row are related but not identical: the pill ranks whole families by their total opportunity added up across every material in the family, while this row ranks individual materials on their own. In most networks the family named in the hero pill will have one or more of its materials near the top of this row, but the two lists are computed separately, so treat the pill as an at-a-glance pointer and this row as the specific, actionable list.

The privacy floor

Top opportunities inherits the same cohort protection that applies to every row on the Materials page. A material is held back from the entire page, including this row, until enough of your own network's locations are buying it for a network-wide price to be shown without narrowing down to a single location's own purchasing. As more locations buy a given material, it clears that bar and becomes eligible to appear, here or elsewhere on the page.

The cohort median each tile compares against is itself anonymized, cross-network reference data: a typical price computed from operator invoice data across the wider Verinode network, protected by the same minimum-contributor floor that guards every peer benchmark on the platform. You get one number, a typical price, never a name or a count of which operators are behind it.

Your own locations' names never appear on this row. Every tile here is a network-wide total or median, not a location-by-location breakdown.

See What HQ sees: the network privacy boundary for how that floor works across HQ more broadly.

Empty state

Before any material clears the opportunity bar, the row shows this text instead of tiles, verbatim:

"No material savings opportunities found yet. They appear as locations contribute invoices and cohorts form."

This is expected in a young network, a network still connecting supplier invoices, or a network whose material prices happen to already sit at or under cohort across the board. Nothing needs to be configured to make this row populate. It fills in on its own as more locations' invoices flow in and as enough of the broader Verinode network contributes pricing data for a cohort median to exist.

How to use it

1. 1Read the hero first. The "Above Cohort" count and the Savings Opportunity dollar figure tell you in one glance whether materials pricing is worth a conversation this month.
2. 2Scan Top opportunities. Each tile already names the material, your network's price, the cohort's price, and the annual dollar figure, so you have everything you need to raise it in a supplier or ops call without opening anything further.
3. 3Check the locations-buying count on each tile. A large-dollar opportunity spread across many locations is a network-wide sourcing conversation; the same dollar figure concentrated at a handful of locations is a more targeted supplier check for those locations specifically.
4. 4Cross-check against Spend by family before a negotiation, it tells you whether the family behind a tile is a large enough share of total spend to justify the time, or a smaller category not worth prioritizing this quarter.
5. 5Bring the specific material names and dollar gaps into your next ops or supplier call. The row gives you the number and the direction; the sourcing decision is yours.

Best-practice example

Say Top opportunities shows its first tile reading "Your network pays $58 per sheet for 5/8-inch fire-rated drywall. The cohort median is $46," with a sub line "Worth about $41,000 a year across the network" and a meta line "14 locations buying." That is a large gap, spread widely enough that it is a network sourcing conversation, not a one-location problem. Checking Spend by family, Drywall & Finishing is also the family with the largest total network spend, which confirms the time spent chasing this gap is proportional to what the family actually costs the network. From there, the next step is a supplier conversation grounded in a specific number: your network is paying about 26% over the cohort median on this one item, across 14 locations.

Related reading

• Materials: network material-cost benchmarks, the full page tour: the hero band, this row, Spend by family, and All materials, in order.
• What HQ sees: the network privacy boundary, the cohort floor and anonymization mechanics referenced above.
• Network benchmarks: how the section works, the Benchmarks hub and its own thinner Materials pill.
• HQ overview, orientation to the full HQ sidebar.

Data sources