Financial figures in prospect materials (Item 19 / FPR gate)

What this control does

Recruiting turns your network's live data into a prospect-ready recruitment deck, a Discovery Day pack, and (for the franchisees behind the numbers) a Quarterly Network Review. Several of those figures are performance numbers, most importantly a top-quartile gross margin. Handing a prospective franchisee a margin figure outside a properly disclosed Item 19 is not a Verinode question, it is a Federal Trade Commission Franchise Rule question: the Rule treats a franchisor's financial performance representation (an "FPR") to a prospect as something that can only be made inside the Franchise Disclosure Document's Item 19, not scattered informally across a sales conversation or a marketing deck.

Verinode does not decide this for you and does not hardcode an answer. It surfaces the requirement, gives your HQ admin a single explicit opt-in, records who acknowledged it and when, and then, wherever margin figures would otherwise appear in prospect-facing material, withholds them until that opt-in is on. Non-financial figures, footprint, activity level, cycle time, operator score, reputation, certification coverage, are never gated by this control. Only margin is.

This article covers the toggle itself: where it lives, exactly what it says in each state, who can change it, what gets recorded when you turn it on, and how that single flag reaches into the Recruiting page, the prospect deck, the Discovery Day pack, and the Quarterly Network Review.

Where to find it

Open Recruiting from the HQ sidebar at hq.verinode.ai/recruit-grow. The control sits below the page's tile rows, under a hairline separator, headed Financial figures in prospect materials. It's the last thing on the page, directly beneath the Territories row and the deck-generation controls above it.

Why only franchise groups are gated

The gate reads your group's the network rollup column in the network data, which is one of four values: franchise, association, buying_group, or other. Only franchise triggers the FPR question, because only a franchise-type group is legally selling franchises and filing a Franchise Disclosure Document with an Item 19. An association or a buying group is a cooperative of independent businesses, not a franchisor recruiting new units under its brand, so a margin figure it shares with a prospective member isn't a franchise financial performance representation in the FTC's sense. Verinode reflects that distinction exactly: the toggle, the acknowledgment text, and the suppression logic downstream all key off the same the network rollup === "franchise" check.

What you see, on and off

The block's body copy switches with the state of the setting:

• Off (default): "Margin figures are withheld from prospect materials. Non-financial figures (footprint, activity, cycle time) always show."
• On: "Margin figures are included in Discovery Day packs and the recruitment deck." If the setting has ever been turned on, a second sentence follows: "Enabled by [Admin Name] on [date]." (If the acknowledging admin's name can't be resolved, the sentence just reads "Enabled on [date]" without a name.)

The setting is off by default for every new franchise group. Nothing is ever pre-enabled on your behalf.

Turning it on

If you're signed in as a group admin, a Turn on button (copper fill) sits to the right of the description. Clicking it doesn't flip the setting immediately, it opens a confirmation panel first:

1. 1Click Turn on. A copper-bordered confirmation panel expands beneath the control.
2. 2Read the acknowledgment text: "These are financial performance representations. By enabling this you confirm the figures are disclosed in your Item 19 and that you are responsible for FTC Franchise Rule compliance. Verinode surfaces your network data; the disclosure obligation is yours."
3. 3Click I confirm, enable to proceed, or Cancel to back out and leave the setting off.
4. 4Once enabled, the description immediately updates to the "on" copy, including the "Enabled by [name] on [date]" line, and the button flips to Turn off.

Confirming does two things in the network data at once: it sets recruitment_financials_enabled to true, and it stamps recruitment_financials_ack_by (the acknowledging admin's the network rollup.id) and recruitment_financials_ack_at (the current timestamp). That pairing is the acknowledgment record. Verinode never asks you to re-type an Item 19 number or upload a document, the confirmation is a plain acknowledgment of responsibility, not a data-entry step; the underlying figures Verinode publishes are the same top-quartile and median values already computed for your network's benchmarks.

Turning it off

Turning the setting back off is a single click on Turn off, no confirmation panel. It immediately sets recruitment_financials_enabled back to false. What it does not do is erase the acknowledgment: recruitment_financials_ack_by and recruitment_financials_ack_at are left exactly as they were. If you turn the setting back on later without changing anything else, the description will still cite the original admin and the original date, not a fresh one, because the acknowledgment fields are only written when the value transitions to enabled. The audit trail is cumulative, not reset by an off/on cycle: the record shows who most recently confirmed FPR responsibility, not a live log of every toggle click.

Who can change it

Only a group user with the admin role can click either button. A non-admin group user viewing the Recruiting page still sees the heading and the current-state description, so they know whether margin figures are currently in prospect materials, but no Turn on / Turn off button renders for them at all. This is a read-only view for non-admins, not a disabled button; there's nothing to hover over or ask for permission on.

What actually gets withheld, and what never is

The gate is narrow by design. It touches exactly two figures, both financial:

• Top-quartile gross margin (the P75 margin across contributing franchisees)
• Network median margin

Everything else Recruiting surfaces about your network, franchisee and location counts, states covered, cycle time, operator score, reputation composite, Google rating, certification coverage, is operational or reputational, not a financial performance representation, and is never touched by this setting. A franchise network that leaves the setting off still shows a prospect a complete, current picture of everything except how profitable its top operators are.

How suppression flows into each downstream surface

One shared query, a single Verinode function, computes whether margin figures are allowed for your group (non-franchise groups always allowed; franchise groups only when the setting is on) and, if not, returns null for both margin fields instead of a number. Every surface downstream reads from that same result, so the gate only has to be enforced in one place:

• The Recruiting page itself. The network-footprint hero panel's summary line only appends "· top-quartile margin X%" when the figure is allowed; when it isn't, the clause is simply absent from the sentence. The Take Action tile's right-hand evidence column, which otherwise shows Top-quartile margin alongside Top-quartile cycle, drops the margin stat and shows cycle time alone (or nothing, if neither stat has data yet).
• The prospect recruitment deck (the PDF behind the tile's Generate → control). On the deck's Performance page, the Top-quartile gross margin card renders a plain em dash, with its "Network median" context line reading "Network median: computing," the same fallback text used when the figure simply hasn't finished computing yet. The deck does not print any Item 19 explanation on this page; a gated margin and a not-yet-computed margin look identical to a reader of the deck itself.
• The Discovery Day pack, generated from the same underlying snapshot as the deck, inherits the identical null-margin behavior for its Performance section.
• The Quarterly Network Review (the periodic PDF/xlsx pair in the report library, sometimes called the board slide). This is the one surface that explains itself: its Recruitment section reads "Financial performance figures are provided only in the disclosed Item 19." in place of a margin line whenever the figure is suppressed, rather than a plain dash. This report is read by your own leadership, not a prospect, so it can afford to name the reason.

See The warming-up sample floor on recruitment stats for the separate, unrelated gate that also withholds numbers below a minimum active-franchisee count. The two gates stack independently: a large, established franchise network that hasn't opted into this setting still sees no margin figure anywhere prospect-facing, cycle time, operator score, and reputation figures show normally, only margin is withheld. A small network that has opted in still sees no margin figure until it clears the separate sample floor. Both conditions have to be satisfied before a margin number reaches a prospect.

The privacy boundary this sits inside

This setting is about disclosure law, not about franchisee identity. It never changes what an individual franchisee's own data looks like or who can see it. Every margin figure this gate touches, when it is allowed to show, is already a network aggregate: a top-quartile cut or a median across contributing franchisees, never one operator's number. HQ never sees, and no prospect-facing surface ever shows, a single franchisee's individual margin. The franchisee-level anonymization rule that governs whether the territory map shows real city names or generic labels is a completely separate, always-on control that has nothing to do with this Item 19 opt-in, see The territory coverage map for that rule.

Related articles

• The warming-up sample floor on recruitment stats: the sample-size gate that independently withholds numeric stats below a minimum franchisee count, and how it stacks with this one
• Generate the prospect recruitment deck: the 5-page PDF this setting's margin fields feed into
• Recruiting & Growth: section overview: the full page this control lives at the bottom of
• The territory coverage map: the separate franchisee-anonymization rule
• Discovery Day: the deeper pack generated for the in-person conversation, same suppression rule
• Item 19 disclosure: the regulated Financial Performance Representation itself, generated from the same cohort
• HQ report library: where the Quarterly Network Review lives, including its explicit Item 19 line
• HQ compliance: how HQ tracks certification and standards conformance, a separate compliance surface from this FTC-specific gate