Local network: preferred providers and coverage gaps

What Local network shows

Every franchisee needs a bench of local subcontractors and professional services around them: a mold remediation sub, a fractional CFO, an insurance broker, an answering service. Verinode calls this the local-services network. The Local network row on the Vendors page is where HQ reads that landscape across the whole membership base at once, sees where locations have no provider at all in a given category, and, if you are an admin, designates the providers HQ wants surfaced to franchisees as preferred.

This is aggregate, network-level reading. Verinode never shows HQ a single franchisee's private vendor list, contract, or spend. What HQ sees here is a rollup: how many locations have coverage in a category and how many do not. The underlying local-provider relationships stay with the franchisee that owns them.

Where to find it

Open Vendors from the HQ sidebar at hq.verinode.ai/vendors. The Local network tile sits directly under the hero band, above Off Program. It reads:

• Local network as the label.
• A headline of "N preferred" once your group has designated at least one preferred provider, or "Manage" if none are set yet.
• A sub-line naming the network's single biggest coverage gap, for example "3 locations missing Fractional CFO & Accounting", or "Local provider coverage" if there are no gaps to report.
• Open landscape as the footer meta text, with a chevron.

Click the tile to open the Local network modal. That modal has two sections: Network gaps (read-only, everyone with access to the page) and Preferred providers (read-only list for everyone, with designate/remove controls for admins only).

Network gaps

What it is. Every franchisee is scored, category by category, against the full local-services taxonomy, subcontractors (mold remediation, electrical, roofing, and 19 more), professional services (fractional CFO, legal, insurance brokers, and 5 more), training (IICRC, business coaching, and 3 more), and marketing (SEO, paid advertising, and 4 more). A gap is a category where a franchisee has zero providers on file. Network gaps rolls those per-franchisee gaps up into one number per category: how many locations in your network are missing that category entirely.

What you see. The Network gaps list shows one row per category with any gap, largest first:

• Category label, the human-readable category name (never the underlying database slug).
• "N of M missing", where N is how many franchisee locations have no provider in that category and M is your total franchisee count.

The tile's sub-line surfaces the top row from this same list, so the biggest single gap is visible without opening the modal.

Empty state. If no franchisee is missing any category, the modal reads: "No gaps detected across the network."

How to read it. A gap here does not mean a franchisee has no work getting done in that category, it means Verinode has no provider recorded for them in it. Categories flagged regulated in Verinode's taxonomy (asbestos abatement, legal services, public adjusting, industrial hygiene, fractional CFO and accounting, insurance brokers, biohazard and trauma cleanup, lead paint abatement) are worth the closest look: a gap in one of these is more often a real compliance or capability exposure than a data-entry gap, since franchisees are less likely to skip recording a licensed relationship than an informal one.

Preferred providers

What it is. A preferred provider is a local provider your group has actively designated, from Verinode's local-provider directory, as one HQ wants recommended across the network. Designating a provider does two things: it passively boosts that provider in the recommendation ranking every franchisee sees in their own Local Network view, and it fires an active, one-time in-app notification to every franchisee in your group.

What you see. The Preferred providers list shows one row per designated provider:

• Business name, the provider's name as recorded in Verinode's directory.
• Category, the provider's local-services category label, shown muted beside the name.
• Remove, an admin-only text action at the right of the row.

Empty state. If your group has not designated anything yet, the list reads: "None designated yet."

Designating a preferred provider (admin only)

Only group admins see the Designate a preferred provider panel and the Remove action on existing rows. Non-admin roles see Network gaps and the Preferred providers list, but no controls, the panel and the Remove buttons simply do not render for them.

1. 1Open the Local network tile from Vendors, then find Designate a preferred provider at the bottom of the modal.
2. 2Type at least two characters of a business name into the search box (placeholder: "Search providers by name…"). Verinode searches its local-provider directory by name as you type.
3. 3Each match shows the provider's name, its category, and its city, state where recorded, separated by a middle dot.
4. 4Click Mark preferred on the provider you want. Verinode records the provider's name and category as of this moment (if the provider's directory listing changes later, your preferred-provider row keeps what it captured at designation time) and clears the search box.
5. 5The provider now appears in Preferred providers, and every active franchisee in your group receives an in-app notification naming the provider and its category.

Removing one. Click Remove next to any row in Preferred providers. It drops immediately, no confirmation step, and the passive recommendation boost and the record both go away.

The disclaimer under the panel. The modal states directly under the designate controls: "Preferred providers are surfaced to your franchisees, boosted in their local recommendations. Informational, not an endorsement." Read that literally: Verinode is not vetting, licensing, or vouching for a designated provider, HQ chose to surface it, and franchisees see it labeled as such wherever it appears in their own recommendations.

The privacy boundary, held throughout

Everything on this row reads from core, HQ's own aggregate schema, and Verinode's shared provider directory. It never reaches into a franchisee's private business data (the pii database) to build these views. Concretely:

• Network gaps is a count rollup: how many locations lack a category, never which franchisee, never what they actually use instead.
• Preferred providers is HQ's own list, created by HQ, visible to HQ. It carries no franchisee-specific detail.
• Designating a provider searches Verinode's shared local-provider directory (the same catalog franchisees search from their own Vendors page), not any franchisee's private vendor list.
• The fan-out notification on designation names the provider and its category only. It never carries a franchisee's own data back to HQ, it is one-directional, HQ to franchisees.

Franchisees own the underlying local-provider relationships. HQ's role here is to read where coverage is thin across the network and, when it chooses to, put its weight behind specific providers by designating them, never to see or reach into an individual franchisee's private list.

Best-practice example

Say Network gaps shows "4 of 12 missing Fractional CFO & Accounting" at the top, your network's biggest gap, and Preferred providers is empty. Rather than leaving 4 locations to find an accountant cold, an admin searches the designate panel for a regional CFO firm HQ already has a relationship with, confirms the match by city and state, and clicks Mark preferred. All 12 franchisees get notified that HQ recommends that firm for Fractional CFO & Accounting, and the firm starts surfacing with a boost in every franchisee's own recommendations, including the 4 with no coverage today. HQ never sees which 4 those are by name, only that the gap existed and, over time, whether the count shrinks.

Related reading

• HQ overview: how the Vendors page fits into the rest of the HQ shell.
• Network health: the broader per-franchisee health rollup Vendors sits alongside.
• HQ compliance: how HQ reads adherence and risk across the network without touching franchisee-owned data.
• Broadcasting to your network: the other main way HQ pushes a message out to every franchisee at once.

Data sources