Standards & audits: the HQ overview

What the Standards area is

"Standards" is the part of Verinode HQ that answers one question: what has your network committed every office to, and is that commitment being kept? It is the paired half of Compliance, which answers "how is the network actually doing." Standards is the promise; Compliance, Safety, and Reputation are the report card. Verinode HQ puts them on the same page on purpose, so leadership reads what the network committed to right beside how it is performing, instead of treating the two as separate conversations.

Concretely, Standards covers three things:

• Process Standards, the target number of days per stage the network commits every office to (how long an estimate should take, how fast a supplement should get a response), graded automatically against each office's own stage medians.
• Forms & Audits, the survey, audit, and review programs your members complete or that HQ runs against them, rolled into a network-wide score and per-franchisee findings.
• SOPs & Training, the network's published standard operating procedures and training mandates, authored and tracked as brand-standard programs.

Standards is not a job-management or LMS surface. Verinode HQ never opens a member's per-job file to produce any of these numbers; every figure here comes from a nightly aggregate rollup computed from data your members already generate in their own Verinode IQ accounts. Franchisees keep ownership of their operational data. HQ sees the aggregate standing, never the underlying job list.

How the old /standards hub folded into Compliance

Until July 11, 2026, Process Standards and Forms & Audits lived under their own standalone hub at /standards. That hub has been retired. The three surfaces it pointed to did not go away, they moved: Process Standards and Forms & Audits are now entry tiles on the Compliance page, and SOPs & Training, which never had its own hub screen, picked up a home in the same row so it wasn't left unreachable from the sidebar.

The reasoning is straightforward. A franchisor's brand-health story has two halves that belong together: what the network commits to (standards) and how the network is actually doing against certification, safety, and reputation (compliance). Splitting those across two separate pages meant leadership had to hold two mental models in their head at once. Folding Standards into Compliance puts the whole story, commitment and performance, on one page.

If you have the old URL bookmarked, hq.verinode.ai/standards still resolves. It is now a permanent redirect straight to hq.verinode.ai/brand-compliance, so nothing that pointed at the old hub is broken. The Process Standards editor itself kept its own address, hq.verinode.ai/standards/process, unaffected by the parent redirect.

Where to find it now

Open the Risk band in the HQ sidebar, then click Compliance. That opens hq.verinode.ai/brand-compliance.

The page is built as a stack of rows. Standards & Audits is the second row, sitting directly under the Brand health composite hero and directly above Safety Incidents. It renders as three double-width tiles side by side: Process Standards, Forms & Audits, and SOPs & Training. Below Safety Incidents, the same page continues into Cert Coverage, Critical Gaps, per-franchisee Compliance, Reputation Watch, Top Reputation, and finally the brand-protection audit trail, all of which are the "how is the network doing" half of the story and are covered in full in /help/hq-compliance.

Standards & Audits is a navigation row, not a scoreboard you edit in place. Every number on its three tiles is read-only here; setting a target-days standard, reviewing an audit finding, or activating a training program happens after you click through to the destination page.

Tile 1: Process Standards

What it measures. Process Standards are the target days per milestone transition your network commits every office to, for example how long an estimate should take once a job is assigned, or how fast a supplement should get a response. HQ sets a target once per transition; every office's own stage median from the nightly rollup is graded against it automatically, and this tile reads the result of that grading.

What you'll see, depending on where your network is:

• No standards set anywhere. The headline reads "Not set." The subtitle reads exactly: "Target days per stage the network commits to. Set standards from the network's own medians; every office is measured against the same bar." The tile's accent is neutral gray.
• Standards are set, but conformance hasn't been scored yet. The headline shows the standard count instead, for example "4 set."
• Standards are set and scored. The headline shows the network-wide conformance percentage, for example "82% conformance," the share of graded office checks across every standardized transition that came back Met. A small gauge chart sits under the headline. The subtitle reads the stage-standard count plus either "· N office check(s) missed" when at least one office has come back Missed, or "· network on pace" when nothing has slipped.

Accent color. Gray with no standards set. Green once standards exist and nothing has missed. Yellow (amber) once at least one office check has come back Missed.

Clicking it opens hq.verinode.ai/standards/process, the Process Standards editor. There, HQ admins type a target-days value per milestone transition, or adopt the network's own current median with one click; non-admin viewers see the same rows read-only. That page carries its own hero (a conformance percentage or standards-set count, a Standards Set count, a Checks Met count, and a Missed count) and, below it, every registered milestone transition your network tracks, grouped by process (job lifecycle, supplement turnaround, recruiting pipeline, incident follow-through, and any others your network has registered).

Tile 2: Forms & Audits

What it measures. This tile rolls up every audit form your network runs, surveys, audits, and review programs that franchisees complete or that HQ runs against them, into one network-wide read.

What you'll see:

• Before a network average audit score exists. The headline shows the total form count instead, for example "12 forms."
• Once at least one audit has scored. The headline shows the network's average audit score, for example "84 avg score." That average is weighted by each franchisee's own audit count, so a franchisee with one audit at 100 does not outweigh one with ten audits averaging 80.
• The subtitle always reads "{open} open · {unresolved findings} unresolved finding(s)," for example "6 open · 2 unresolved findings."
• A dot-cluster preview shows open forms as dots, with unresolved findings flagged in a distinct tone, whenever at least one form is open.

Accent color. Green with zero open audit findings. Yellow under five open findings. Red (Ember Red) at five or more.

Clicking it opens the full Forms & Audits page at hq.verinode.ai/forms. That page has its own hero (total forms, a pill counting how many franchisees have any form activity, a breakdown into surveys/audits/reviews, response rate, average audit score, and open findings) plus three rows: Open Audit Findings (one tile per franchisee with an unresolved finding, worst-first), Response Rate (franchisees whose invite response rate has fallen under 50%, flagged only once they have at least three invites on record so a single invite doesn't get flagged on a thin sample), and Activity by Franchisee (every franchisee with any form activity, their total count, and how much closed in the last 30 days versus is still open). See /help/forms-overview for the full page.

Tile 3: SOPs & Training

What it is. Unlike the other two tiles, this one is a plain entry point, not a live scoreboard. It always shows the headline "Programs" with the subtitle: "Network-published procedures and training mandates, authored as brand-standard and training programs." Its accent is copper, the platform's neutral navigation color, because there is no health signal being graded here, only a door into the catalog.

Clicking it opens the Programs catalog at hq.verinode.ai/programs?type=brand_standard, the same catalog surface used for vendor-approval, carrier, TPA, cert-mandate, training, and safety programs, pre-filtered to the Brand standard type. On that filtered view you'll find a hero (active program count, a pill for live versus draft, and, once at least one program exists, total approved-party and total franchisee-enrollment counts across the network), plus Active, Drafts, and Sunset rows, one tile per program. HQ admins also see a + New program button in the page header for drafting a new brand-standard SOP or training mandate directly from this filtered view.

The privacy boundary

Every number behind these three tiles is a nightly aggregate, never a single franchisee's private business data:

• Process Standards conformance grades each office's own stage median from the nightly rollup, never an individual job.
• Forms & Audits reads a nightly per-franchisee summary of form counts and scores, never the actual survey responses or audit narratives themselves.
• Programs reads catalog metadata, status, enrollment counts, approved-party counts, never a franchisee's operational detail.

Franchisee names follow the same identity rule as the rest of Compliance and the Network page: in a franchise or association network of independently owned locations, names render as stable anonymized labels; in a single-owner, multi-location network operating under one tax ID, real location names show throughout. Either way, HQ never opens a franchisee's actual job file, invoice, or claim from any surface reached through these three tiles.

How to use it

1. 1Open Compliance in the sidebar to reach hq.verinode.ai/brand-compliance. Standards & Audits is the row right under the Brand health hero.
2. 2Glance at the Process Standards tile first when you want to know whether the network is keeping the pace it committed to, not just whether a bar exists at all.
3. 3Use the Forms & Audits tile's color, green, yellow, or red, as a quick read on whether audit findings are piling up anywhere before opening the full page.
4. 4Click through to Process Standards when you need to set a new target, adopt a network median, or check which transitions are still unscored. Click through to Forms & Audits for the per-franchisee findings or response-rate lists. Click through to SOPs & Training when you need to review, activate, or draft the actual procedures and training mandates behind the standards.
5. 5Read the rest of the Compliance page, Safety Incidents, Cert Coverage, Critical Gaps, and Reputation, for how the network is doing day to day, separate from what it has committed to.

Empty states, in full

• Process Standards, nothing set. Headline "Not set." Subtitle: "Target days per stage the network commits to. Set standards from the network's own medians; every office is measured against the same bar."
• Forms & Audits, no forms. Headline shows "0 forms" until at least one form exists; subtitle still reads "{0} open · {0} unresolved finding(s)."
• SOPs & Training has no empty state to speak of, it always reads the same "Programs" headline and links into the catalog regardless of how many programs exist.

Data sources

Related help

• /help/hq-compliance: the full Compliance page this row lives on, including the Brand health hero, Safety Incidents, Cert Coverage, Critical Gaps, per-franchisee Compliance, Reputation Watch, Top Reputation, and the brand-protection audit trail.
• /help/hq-standards-audits-entry: a tile-by-tile deep dive on all three Standards & Audits entry tiles, with every accent color and state spelled out.
• /help/hq-standards-conformance: the full Met / Near / Missed / Warming up grading system behind Process Standards, and its read-only scoreboard on the Network page.
• /help/forms-overview: the full Forms & Audits page reached from the Forms tile.
• /help/hq-programs: the Programs catalog reached from the SOPs & Training tile, including how programs are authored and enrolled.
• /help/network-health: the Network page, where the same conformance data appears as a scoreboard tile and a Conformance tab.
• /help/hq-network-privacy-boundary: the full explanation of what HQ can and cannot see across the network.
• /help/hq-overview: the HQ product overview and where Compliance sits in the nav.