Programs: how HQ codifies what the network adopts

What a program is

A great deal of what a franchise HQ or association actually does, day to day, is not "run the business." It is codify a rule for the network and then track who follows it: which vendors are approved to bill against a job, which carrier partnerships the network has signed, which TPAs franchisees are enrolled with, what training every location has to complete, what brand standard applies, what safety certification is mandatory. Historically that lived in a spreadsheet, a binder, and a lot of email. In Verinode HQ it lives as a program: one row in the network data, with everything that program needs hanging off it, an approved-party list or a franchisee enrollment list, an audit history, an open-violations queue, and (where relevant) KPI snapshots.

The Programs page is where every program in the network lives, in one place, organized by status: active, draft, and sunset. It replaced a set of separate, type-specific admin screens (a preferred-vendor list here, a carrier list there) with a single primitive that works the same way regardless of what kind of program it is.

Where to find it

Open Programs from the HQ sidebar at hq.verinode.ai/programs.

The page has five parts, top to bottom:

1. A type-filter tab strip.
2. A hero panel summarizing the network's programs.
3. An Apps row: the Program Negotiation analyst app first (see The Program Negotiation app), then the talk-to-your-analyst and network-coverage tiles, and, for admins, the two authoring tiles described below. Every tile here is a tool rather than a finding, so this page carries no Take Action row.
4. An Explore row holding the legacy preferred-vendor, preferred-carrier, and preferred-TPA directory (more on why this is separate, below).
5. Rows of program tiles: Active, Drafts, Sunset.

The eight program types

the network data.type supports eight values. They fall into two families:

Partner programs, built around an external party the network deals with:

| Type | What it governs | |---|---| | Vendor approval | An approved-vendor list, qualified through a weighted audit rubric. | | Carrier | An insurance-carrier preferred-contractor relationship, scored against a KPI threshold matrix. | | TPA | A third-party-administrator enrollment, tracked against file-level KPIs. | | Marketing co-op | A network-funded marketing pool: franchisees contribute, the network reimburses approved spend. |

Network standards, built around what every location has to do or hold:

| Type | What it governs | |---|---| | Cert mandate | A certification every enrolled franchisee must hold or maintain. | | Training | A course catalog with completion tracking. | | Brand standard | A brand-consistency requirement across the network. | | Safety | A safety program or protocol every location follows. |

Every program, regardless of type, carries the same shape: a status (draft, active, sunset, or archived), an enrollment model (approved_list, mandatory, or opt_in), and an audit cadence (continuous, monthly, quarterly, annual, or event-driven). The enrollment model determines what shows up underneath it: an approved-list program (vendor approval, carrier, TPA) tracks approved external parties; a mandatory or opt-in program (cert mandate, training, brand standard, safety, marketing co-op) tracks which franchisees are enrolled and in what state.

The hero panel

At the top of the page, a headline number reads the count of active programs across the whole network (not filtered by whichever type tab is selected). Below it a status pill reads one of three things:

• "N live" when at least one program is active.
• "N in draft" when nothing is active yet but drafts exist.
• "Nothing live" when there is nothing active and nothing in draft.

Under the pill, a line of context: once programs exist, it reads "N approved party(ies) across the network · N franchisee enrollment(s)." adding up approved parties and enrollments across every program in the group. Until any program exists, it instead reads the empty-state copy:

"Programs let HQ codify what the network adopts, preferred vendors, carrier partnerships, TPA programs, training catalogs, and marketing co-op. Publish your first from the Apps row below."

Three secondary figures sit beside the headline:

• Vendor approval, count of vendor-approval programs in the network.
• Carrier + TPA, carrier programs plus TPA programs, combined, labeled "Insurance partners."
• Drafts, count of draft-status programs, labeled "Pending activation." This one lights up (an amber tone) whenever it is above zero, since a pile of unactivated drafts is worth a second look.

Creating a program

Group admins see a Publish a program tile in the Apps row (non-admin HQ users do not see it, and don't see any of the create / edit affordances described below; they can browse and read everything else).

1. 1Click the Publish a program tile in the Apps row. A modal titled "New program" opens.
2. 2Pick a Type from the dropdown. Five types are offered here: Vendor approval program, Carrier program, TPA program, Marketing co-op, Training. (Cert mandate, brand standard, and safety programs aren't yet offered through this modal.) Each choice shows a one-line hint underneath, e.g. "Approved-vendor list with weighted audit rubric + cycle." for vendor approval, or "Network-funded marketing program with contribution + reimbursement ledger." for co-op.
3. 3Enter a Name (required) and an optional Description ("What is this program and what's expected of franchisees?").
4. 4Review the defaults line beneath the description: it names the enrollment model, audit cadence, and (where applicable) partner kind the chosen type will start with, e.g. "Defaults: enrollment approved_list · audit cadence annual · partner kind vendor." The note under it: "These flip later from the program detail surface", meaning nothing here is locked in; you can change enrollment model, cadence, and partner kind after creation.
5. 5Click Save draft.

Every new program lands as a draft. Nothing is visible or binding on a single franchisee until an admin opens it and activates it. This two-step (draft, then activate) exists on purpose: HQ can build out a program's rules, its rubric or KPI matrix, its target, before it touches anyone's compliance status.

Default type-to-setting pairings on creation:

| Type | Default enrollment | Default audit cadence | Default partner kind | |---|---|---|---| | Vendor approval | Approved list | Annual | Vendor | | Carrier | Opt-in | Quarterly | Carrier | | TPA | Opt-in | Quarterly | TPA | | Marketing co-op | Mandatory | Monthly | (none) | | Training | Opt-in | Event-driven | (none) |

Draft a program (guided flow)

Beside it in the same Apps row, admins also see a Draft a vendor program tile. This launches a shorter, three-step guided deck purpose-built for vendor-approval programs, useful when you know you want an approved-vendor list for a specific category but haven't thought through the rubric yet.

1. 1Choose an Area. Search or browse the network's vendor categories and pick one. Verinode suggests a program name from the category (e.g. picking "Water Mitigation Equipment" suggests something like "Water Mitigation Equipment Approved Vendor Program").
2. 2What the Program Requires. Confirm or edit the suggested name. Answer "What does a vendor have to do to qualify?" as a comma-separated list of requirements. If the network already has carriers on file, toggle which ones the program must satisfy. Optionally list integration requirements (e.g. "Xactimate, QuickBooks").
3. 3Review and Draft. A summary shows Area, Name, Enrollment, Audit cadence, Requirements, Carriers, and Integrations, with the enrollment model and audit cadence written in plain language rather than the raw setting name. A closing note reads: "Creates a draft program. Nothing goes live until you review the qualifying vendors and activate it."

Click Create draft and the deck confirms with "Your draft program is ready for review. Set the qualifying vendors and activate it when you are happy with the terms," and a link to open the new draft directly. If the network has no vendor categories on file yet to build a program around, the button surfaces "No vendor areas in your network yet to build a program around." instead of opening the deck.

The program tiles: Active, Drafts, Sunset

Below the type tabs, three rows of tiles list every program that matches the current type filter.

Active. Each tile shows the program's type as its label (e.g. "Vendor approval," "Carrier program"), the program name as the headline, and a summary line built from whatever data exists: "N approved vendor(ies)" (or carrier, TPA, whatever the partner kind is), "N enrolled," and "N on probation," joined together, in that order, whenever the counts are non-zero. A program with none of that yet falls back to the first 80 characters of its description, or "Not yet wired up" if there's no description either. The tile's footer note reads "Activated N days ago" (or "today," or "N months ago") if the program has been activated, otherwise "Created N days ago." When nothing is active for the current filter, the row reads: "No active programs for this view. Activate a draft below, or publish one from the Apps row above."

Drafts. Same tile shape, but muted (border-tone accent rather than a signal color), with the summary line always the description (or "No description yet") and the footer always "Created N days ago." Empty state: "No programs in draft. Activate one from here when ready."

Sunset. Programs that have been wound down but not archived. Tile label reads "{Type} · Sunset." Empty state: "No sunset programs."

Clicking any tile opens that program's detail page. Marketing co-op programs route to a purpose-built ledger view (/franchise/programs/coop/[id]); every other type opens a generic detail page (/franchise/programs/[id]) that renders the same way regardless of type, showing only the sections that have data.

Inside a program: the detail page

The detail page's hero repeats the program's full type name (e.g. "Approved vendor program," "Certification mandate") as its eyebrow, a status pill (draft, active, sunset, or archived), and a headline count: qualified approved parties for an approved-list program, or active enrollments for a mandatory/opt-in program. Beside it: how many of that count are on probation, how many open violations exist (with "All clear" when there are none, or the count that are critical), and how many audits were conducted in the last 90 days against the program's stated cadence.

What renders underneath depends on the program's enrollment model and type:

• Approved parties (vendor approval, carrier, TPA programs). One tile per vendor, carrier, TPA, cert body, lab, or broker on the list, showing its qualification status (pending, qualified, probation, suspended, or removed), its party kind, and either its next audit due date, its last audit date, or the date it was qualified. For vendor parties, a negotiated monthly rate can be captured here ("Negotiated $1,950/mo · ±10%"), this is what drives the vendor rate-drift signal on the Vendors page: when the network's median per-franchisee spend on that vendor exceeds the negotiated rate by more than the tolerance band, the vendor surfaces there as a renegotiation candidate.
• Franchisee enrollments (cert mandate, training, brand standard, safety programs). One tile per enrolled franchisee, its status (mandatory, enrolled, probation, decertified, or withdrawn), open violation count, and last audit score.
• Audit rubric (vendor-approval programs only). A weighted-criteria scorecard: each criterion has a label, a weight, and a max-point value; a pass threshold is set as a percentage of the total possible points.
• KPI threshold matrix (carrier programs only). A fixed set of four operational metrics, cycle time, first-contact time, billing accuracy, and customer satisfaction, each with a green and an amber band and an optional auto-decertify-on-red flag.
• Network target (any type, when declared). A single metric an admin has flagged as a network-wide target, e.g. "≥ 4.5" on a reputation metric, or "≤ 3 years" on average vehicle age, with an optional grace period for newly enrolled franchisees. Once set, that same metric's tile on every franchisee's own section page (Facilities, Fleet, Equipment, Commercial, Reputation) picks up a "Meets target" or "Below target" tag automatically.
• Open violations, recent audits, and KPI snapshots render only when there's data to show.

Marketing co-op programs skip all of this in favor of a ledger: total contributions collected, reimbursements approved and paid, how many reimbursement requests are pending approval and their combined dollar value, and a rough running pool balance (contributions minus reimbursements paid). Franchisee names on pending and recent entries are drawn from the same office directory HQ already has (their program's a mandatory network fee, not a private business record).

Why HQ sees only aggregates and compliance, never a franchisee's private data

This is the load-bearing rule behind every screen described above, so it's worth stating precisely, because Programs is one of the few HQ surfaces that legitimately shows information about a named individual franchisee, not just a network aggregate.

What HQ does see, per franchisee, inside a program: whether they're enrolled and in what status (mandatory, enrolled, probation, decertified, withdrawn), their audit history and scores against that program's rubric or KPI matrix, open and resolved violations, and, for a co-op program, their contribution and reimbursement ledger entries. This is compliance data. It's exactly the set of facts a franchisor needs to run the standards it's setting, and franchisees already know HQ tracks it because it's what enrollment in the program means.

What HQ does not see: the franchisee's underlying business, their margins, their customer list, their vendor invoices, their job-level financials, the private data that feeds their own Verinode benchmarks. A vendor's negotiated rate lives on the program, because HQ negotiated it; what any individual franchisee actually spends against that vendor does not surface here as a private ledger, it surfaces only in the aggregate as a rate-drift signal once enough of the network's spend, in combination, points somewhere.

Put another way: a program is HQ's rulebook and the network's compliance record against it, not a window into any one franchisee's books. That boundary is what makes the rest of the platform trustworthy, franchisees know exactly what HQ can see because it maps to what they agreed to when they enrolled, and nothing more.

The legacy Preferred Vendors / Carriers / TPAs directory

The Explore row, which sits above Active / Drafts / Sunset, carries up to three tiles: Preferred Vendors, Preferred Carriers, and Preferred TPAs. It follows the type filter, so picking Carriers in the tabs leaves only Preferred Carriers, and a type with no partner directory (Co-op, Training) hides the row. Each opens an overlay listing that directory (visible to everyone, editable only by admins). This is deliberately separate infrastructure from the network data: it reads and writes the network data / _carriers / _tpas, the tables that predate the Programs primitive. It stays in place because operator badges, settings sections, and the report generator still read from it.

Each row shows the partner's canonical name, any internal note, and underneath, its tier (Approved, Preferred, or Required) plus adoption once the snapshot job has measured it. The tile itself carries the count and the tier mix, so you can read the shape of each directory without opening it.

Admins click Add vendor (or carrier / TPA) at the top of a tab to search the canonical entity catalog by name, pick a tier, and optionally leave internal notes. Picks made here flow into operator badges and adoption metrics across the network, the same way the network data approved parties do, just through the older path.

Related

• HQ overview, how Programs fits into the rest of the HQ shell.
• Network health, the network-wide view Programs' compliance data feeds into.
• Standards, where cert mandate, training, brand standard, and safety programs are headed as dedicated sections.
• Compliance, the network's violations, audits, and enforcement in one place.
• Benchmarks, how vendor rate-drift and KPI signals surface once enough network data supports them.