Generating a new report from the Vault

What this covers

The Vault is the HQ document library: every PDF and spreadsheet your network has generated lives here, organized by type, with a running audit trail of who pulled what and when. It is not where a document gets built. Generation happens on the surface built for that specific job, and the finished output lands in the Vault afterward so anyone who needs it can find it without hunting back through the tool that made it. This article covers the admin-only Generate report button in the Vault header, exactly where it sends you, how the Discovery Day generator behind it works, and why the Vault itself never builds anything on its own.

Where to find it

Open Vault from the HQ sidebar (it sits in the top group of sections, alongside Feed, Decisions, Action Plans, Playbooks, and Broadcast) or go directly to hq.verinode.ai/vault. Every group user, admin or not, can open the Vault and browse everything in it. The Generate report → button in the top right of the page is admin-only: non-admins see the same library with no button there.

What "Generate report" actually does

Clicking Generate report → does not open a form on the Vault page. It takes you straight to the Discovery Day section, the surface where the actual report-creation flow lives. The Vault's job is to index and store what's already been generated, across every document type; Discovery Day is one of the builders that feeds it.

On the Discovery Day page, the generation action is a single tile labeled Download, with the headline Generate Discovery Day pack and the sub-line "One-click PDF with all the metrics above, anonymized, ready for prospect calls." Its meta line reads "Updates every time the aggregator refreshes," meaning the numbers behind the pack are only as current as the last aggregator run, not something you have to manually keep in sync.

1. 1From the Vault, click Generate report →. You land on the Discovery Day page.
2. 2Discovery Day itself shows the network snapshot you're about to hand a prospect: total members and locations, a network composite score, top-quartile margin and cycle time (where a disclosed financial-performance representation exists to source it), a reputation snapshot, and certification coverage. Everything on the page is anonymized, this is the same data the pack will contain.
3. 3Click the Download tile. A picker opens: Generate Discovery Day pack. Optionally attribute the pull to a specific prospect from your recruitment pipeline (a dropdown lists everyone currently inquired, qualified, negotiating, or signed), or leave it as a generic pack with no prospect attached. If your pipeline has no prospects yet, the picker tells you so and the pack pulls generically.
4. 4Choose Download generic or select a prospect and choose Download for prospect. Either way, the PDF downloads immediately, and a row is written back to the Vault's access trail.

Once the pack has been pulled, it shows up in the Discovery Day Packs row the next time you open the Vault. If you attributed the pull to a specific prospect, that pull also appears in a Pack history per prospect list on the Discovery Day page itself, grouped by prospect so you can see who has received which pull and when, useful when the same prospect has been sent the pack more than once across a longer sales cycle.

Other report types have their own generators too

Quarterly reviews, compliance audits, and member cohort reports follow the same underlying pattern as Discovery Day Packs: each is authored on its own dedicated surface elsewhere in HQ, not through the Vault's Generate button (which routes only to Discovery Day), and each lands in the Vault as a finished artifact once generation completes. A quarterly network report, for instance, can also be built on demand from its own generator outside the Vault, and separately runs automatically at the start of each new quarter, so a report is often already waiting in the Vault before anyone generates one by hand. The Vault never becomes a form for building any of these; it only ever indexes what's already been produced, regardless of which surface produced it.

Why the Vault doesn't generate directly

A generator needs live inputs, sometimes an extra step like Discovery Day's prospect picker, and a workflow shaped around the kind of document being built. A library needs to stay a fast, predictable index that scans the same way no matter what's in it. Folding generation into the Vault would mean every row would need to know how to build its own document type instead of just displaying it, and every future report type would mean rebuilding the library's own logic. Keeping generation on its dedicated surface and browsing on the Vault means either can change shape independently: Discovery Day's builder can evolve without touching how the Vault renders a finished tile, and a new report type can start shipping into the Vault the moment its own generator exists.

The hero: Generated documents

At the top of the Vault, the hero panel reads Generated documents with the total count of every report your network has ever generated as the headline.

• Pill: reads "N new 30d" when at least one document generated in the last 30 days; "Library current" when the library has documents but nothing new in the last 30 days; "Nothing yet" when the library is empty.
• Subtext: once anything exists, one line combining the Discovery Day Pack count, the quarterly review count, and how recently the last document generated ("3 Discovery Day Packs · 2 quarterly reviews · last generated 5 days ago"). With nothing generated yet, it reads: "Generated reports land here as Discovery Day Packs, quarterly reviews, compliance audits, and member cohorts ship. PDFs are stored with their period and a link back to the franchisee data they cite."

Three secondary figures sit below the headline: Discovery Day Packs ("Item-19-style outputs"), Quarterly reviews ("Board-ready snapshots"), and Compliance audits ("Audit + cohort artifacts").

The rows

Below the hero, five horizontal tile rows. Every row draws from the same underlying set of documents; each is just a different filter on it, and every tile renders the same way regardless of which row it's in.

• Recent, up to 12 of the newest documents across every type, most recent first. Empty state: "No documents generated yet. Use the Generate button to run a Discovery Day Pack or open the Discovery Day surface for the full builder."
• Discovery Day Packs, empty state: "No Discovery Day Packs generated yet. Item-19-style outputs land here once Discovery Day generation runs."
• Quarterly reviews, empty state: "No quarterly reviews yet."
• Compliance audits, empty state: "No compliance audits yet."
• Member cohort reports, empty state: "No member-cohort reports yet."

Every tile shows the same four pieces of information: a label (the document type), a headline (the period it covers, as a month range when both a start and end date exist, or the generation date otherwise), a sub-line ("PDF + XLSX available" when both formats finished, "Generation incomplete" if the export didn't fully complete), and a meta line ("Generated N days ago," or "today"/"1 day ago" for recent edges). Click any tile to open its file: the PDF opens if available, otherwise the spreadsheet opens if that's what finished.

The access trail

Below the tile rows, an Access trail section lists every time an HQ document has been pulled: "Every HQ document pull lands here. Defensible for compliance review without crossing the operator-data boundary." Each row shows the document type (Discovery Day pack, Item 19 pack, board slide, a signed counsel-review link, and so on), who pulled it (a group user's name, "Outside counsel" for a signed external review link, or a neutral placeholder when teammate identities are redacted for your network), a short reference (a cohort identifier, a section name, a franchise-year and quarter, or a franchisee count, whichever apply), and the date and time it was accessed. Empty state: "No document pulls recorded yet. The first download from any HQ document route lands here."

This trail spans every route that produces an HQ document, not just the Discovery Day pull, so it is the place to check for a defensible record of who accessed a given document and when, for a board review or a compliance question.

The privacy boundary

Every document in the Vault, and every figure a report cites, is built from network-level aggregates: composite scores, medians, percentiles, and counts computed across your membership, not a single franchisee's raw books. Franchisees are memberships in your network, not seats on a license, and what feeds these reports is the aggregate roll-up of their data, never one member's individual job files, invoices, or client records surfaced to another member or to HQ users who shouldn't see them. That is the same boundary that holds everywhere else in HQ.

Related help articles

• /help/discovery-day: the builder behind Discovery Day Packs in full, including the network snapshot it's built from
• /help/hq-vault-overview: the Vault's full layout, hero, and tile rows
• /help/hq-vault-access-trail: the access-trail feature in depth
• /help/hq-overview: what HQ is and how its sections fit together
• /help/hq-compliance: the compliance view that quarterly reviews and audits draw from
• /help/item-19: franchise disclosure and financial-performance reporting context for Item-19-style packs

Data sources