Drafting a new program with the guided deck

What the guided draft deck is

A program in Verinode HQ is a formal standard your network runs against a vendor area, a carrier, a TPA, a certification, a training requirement, a brand standard, a safety rule, or a marketing co-op, complete with an enrollment model, an audit cadence, and (for vendor programs) a rubric of qualifying criteria. Building one from a blank form means deciding all of that up front. The guided draft deck exists so you do not have to: you pick the vendor area, tell it what matters to you, and it lands a complete draft, name, enrollment model, audit cadence, and rubric already filled in, that you review and activate on your own terms.

The deck is scoped to vendor-approval programs only. It walks you from a vendor category to a drafted "approved list" program in three short steps and suggests sensible defaults at every point, so the program that lands is one you can approve as-is or adjust before going live. Nothing it creates is active. Every draft lands in Draft status and stays there until you open it and activate it yourself.

Verinode does not decide which vendors qualify or what your standards should be. The deck reads the vendor areas already in your network's catalog and turns the requirements you type into a rubric; you are the one who reviews and activates.

Where to find it

Open Programs from the HQ sidebar, or go directly to hq.verinode.ai/programs. If you are a group admin, a Draft a program button sits at the top of the page, beside the program type filter tabs (All, Vendor Approval, Carrier, TPA, Marketing Co-op, Training, Cert Mandate, Brand Standard, Safety). Viewers do not see this button; drafting a program is an admin-only action.

Click Draft a program and Verinode loads the vendor areas and carrier roster your network already has on file, then opens the deck. If your button shows a loading spinner briefly, that is this lookup running.

Empty state. If your network has no vendor areas at all yet, the deck never opens. Instead, red text appears under the button: "No vendor areas in your network yet to build a program around." Vendor areas come from Verinode's shared vendor category catalog and populate as your franchisees' vendor and spend data flows in. If the call itself fails for any other reason, the message reads "Could not start a program draft. Try again."

The three-step flow

The deck opens as a centered dialog with a steel-blue accent bar and a "Program Draft" label in the header. Three dots at the bottom of the dialog track your progress through the steps; the active step's dot stretches wider. A Back link appears in the header once you are past the first step, so you can revise an earlier answer without losing what you typed. Closing the dialog (the X in the corner, or clicking outside it) discards the draft and creates nothing.

1. 1Choose an Area. The deck asks "Which area should this approval program cover?" and lists every vendor category in your network's catalog, one per row, alphabetically. Type in the Search areas box to filter the list by name. If nothing matches your search, the list reads "No areas match." Click a category to select it. Verinode immediately suggests a program name, "Approved [Category] Vendors", for example "Approved Water Mitigation Equipment Vendors", and advances you to the next step. You can still edit the suggested name.
2. 2What the Program Requires. This step captures what a vendor has to do to qualify, and pre-fills nothing except the name suggested in step one:
3. 3- Program name, editable text, defaulting to the suggestion from step one.
4. 4- What does a vendor have to do to qualify?, a free-text box (placeholder example: "strong Verinode score, integrates with Xactimate, meets carrier documentation requirements"). Type your requirements separated by commas, each one becomes a line in the program's rubric. You can leave this blank; a stock rubric is used instead (covered below).
5. 5- Which carriers must it satisfy?, a row of toggle pills, one per carrier your network has billed against in the last 36 months, ranked by billed volume. This section only appears if your network has carrier volume on file. Click a pill to select it (it turns steel blue); click again to deselect. This is aggregate network volume, not any single franchisee's carrier list.
6. 6- Which tools must it integrate with?, a free-text field (placeholder example: "Xactimate, QuickBooks"), comma-separated.
7. 7Continue stays disabled until you have typed a program name.
8. 8Review and Draft. A read-only summary of everything you are about to create:
9. 9- Area, the vendor category you picked.
10. 10- Name, your program name.
11. 11- Enrollment, the enrollment model Verinode assigned (see below).
12. 12- Audit cadence, the cadence Verinode assigned (see below).
13. 13- Requirements, the rubric criteria that will seed the program, joined with semicolons.
14. 14- Carriers, the carriers you selected, or "None" if you selected none.
15. 15- Integrations, the tools you listed, or "None" if you listed none.
16. 16Below the summary: "Creates a draft program. Nothing goes live until you review the qualifying vendors and activate it." Click Create draft to land the program. If creation fails, for example because a program with the same name-derived slug already exists, the error appears in red at the bottom of the step and nothing is created; fix the name and try again.

What Verinode suggests, and why

The deck does not ask you to choose an enrollment model or an audit cadence. It infers both from what you typed in step two, so the draft is never a blank template:

• Enrollment model is always Approved list. Vendor-approval programs are approved-list by nature, a fixed roster of vendors that have qualified, so this is not inferred from your text, it is the only model that fits the program type.
• Audit cadence defaults to Annual. If your qualification requirements mention compliance, safety, carrier obligations, audits, insurance, or OSHA, in any wording, the suggested cadence tightens to Quarterly instead. The idea is simple: requirements with a compliance or safety dimension get checked more often than a general quality bar.
• Requirements (rubric criteria) come straight from what you typed, one criterion per comma-separated phrase. If you left the requirements box blank, Verinode seeds the rubric with five stock criteria instead:

1. Verinode score at or above the network median 2. Adopted by multiple locations in the network 3. Satisfaction at or above target 4. Integrates with the core stack 5. Meets carrier requirements

These are starting points, not final answers. Every one of them, enrollment model, audit cadence, and the rubric itself, can be changed after the draft lands, before or after you activate it.

What happens when you click Create draft

Behind the scenes, "Create draft" does two things in sequence:

1. It creates the program record itself: type vendor_approval, status Draft (a drafted program is never created active), the name you gave it, a URL-safe slug generated from that name, the enrollment model and audit cadence described above, and vendor recorded as the external partner kind. If a program with the same slug already exists in your network, the create step is rejected with an error naming the conflicting slug, pick a different name and try again.
2. Once the program exists, Verinode writes the captured rubric and draft context onto it: the rubric criteria, a pass threshold of 80% (the share of rubric points a vendor needs to qualify, changeable later in the program's rubric editor), and, tucked alongside it for your own reference, the vendor category, the carriers you selected, and the integrations you listed. In the rare case this second write fails, the program itself still exists as a draft; you can fill in or fix the rubric later from the program's own editor.

The programs list refreshes automatically, your new draft appears under its type as soon as the deck closes.

After the draft lands

Once "Create draft" succeeds, the deck's title changes to Draft Created, the header no longer shows a Back link, and the body reads: "Your draft program is ready for review. Set the qualifying vendors and activate it when you are happy with the terms." A link, Open the draft →, takes you straight to the new program's detail page. Click Done to close the deck without navigating away; the draft is already saved either way, nothing is lost by closing here instead.

The draft itself does nothing until you act on it. From the program's detail page you review and adjust the rubric, add the vendors you want on the approved list, and activate the program when you are ready, the same review-and-activate path any program takes. See Programs for the full catalog page and program lifecycle, and Standards for how rubric criteria and audits work once a program is live.

Best-practice example

Say your network has been getting inconsistent water mitigation equipment reliability across locations, and you want to formalize a preferred vendor list. Click Draft a program, search "water" in step one, and pick "Water Mitigation Equipment" from the list. Verinode suggests the name "Approved Water Mitigation Equipment Vendors." In step two, type "reliable uptime, strong Verinode score, meets insurance documentation requirements" into the qualification box, select the two or three carriers your network works with most, and list "Xactimate" as an integration requirement. Because the requirements text mentions "insurance," the review step shows Audit cadence: Quarterly instead of the annual default, a signal the deck picked up the compliance angle in your wording. Review the summary, click Create draft, then open the draft and add the vendors you already trust to the approved list before activating.

Related

• Programs, the catalog page these drafts land on, program types, statuses, and the manual New program form.
• Standards, rubric criteria, audits, and how a program's pass threshold is enforced once it is active.
• Vendors, the network vendor data (scores, spend, carrier participation) a vendor-approval program's rubric draws on.
• Compliance, how program non-conformance and audit findings surface network-wide.