Hard Recoverable vs Soft Conditional dollars

The rule

Every dollar figure IQ shows you on the Impact page falls into one of two buckets, and Verinode never adds them together into a single number.

• Hard Recoverable is realized money: the dollar value of decisions you have already acted on, where the outcome is booked, not projected.
• Soft Conditional is money still in play: decisions you have acted on where the value is conditional or not yet realized, for example a submission still moving through a carrier, or a benefit that depends on something else happening first.

You will see these as two separate cards everywhere on the page: in the hero panel at the top and again as two separate sections on the Dollars tab. There is no combined total anywhere, and there should not be. Blending a realized number with a conditional one would let a handful of hopeful, unconfirmed dollars inflate the number you actually trust, and it would make the one number that IS proven, the hard-recoverable figure, less credible by association. Keeping them apart is what makes the hard number worth trusting.

Where to find it

Open Impact from the sidebar at iq.verinode.ai/impact. The two numbers appear in two places:

• The hero panel at the top of the page, as two secondary cards beside the main headline.
• The Dollars tab, one of five tabs across the Impact card slider (Goals, Decisions, Dollars, Engagement, Activity). Click either secondary card in the hero, or open the slider and select Dollars, to get the full breakdown.

A window picker in the top-right corner of the page lets you scope both numbers to This month (the default), Last 30 days, Year to date, or All time. Every dollar figure on the page, hero and Dollars tab alike, reflects whichever window is selected.

The hero panel

At the top of Impact, the headline number is Decisions Acted, the count of decisions you acted on inside the current window, with an eyebrow reading "Decisions Acted · [window label]" and a pill showing your engagement level (Strong, Steady, or Warming up). Beside it sit two secondary cards:

• Hard Recoverable. The dollar total, with the sub-label "From Acted Decisions" when the figure is above zero, or "Nothing Realized Yet" when it is zero. Colored in the Expand green tone when there is a number, neutral when there is not.
• Soft Conditional. The dollar total, with the sub-label "In Play, Not Yet Realized" when above zero, or "Nothing Conditional" when it is zero. Colored in the Maintain yellow tone when there is a number, neutral when there is not.

Both cards are click targets. Clicking either opens the Dollars tab directly.

The Dollars tab

The Dollars tab lays out the same two numbers with their full detail underneath, one section per register, both under the current window.

Hard Recoverable section: a heading, the sub-label "Realized $ from acted decisions," and the total dollar figure in the Expand green tone on the right. Below it, a list of every acted decision that carries a hard-recoverable dollar amount in the window, each row showing the decision's title, its dollar amount, and how long ago it happened (for example "3d ago"). Click any row to drill into that decision in place: the card flips to show the decision's title, status, the exact dollar figure with the label "Hard Recoverable" and the line "Realized $ from acted decisions," the timestamp it occurred, and an Open full decision → button that takes you to the full decision workspace.

If nothing has landed in this bucket yet, the section reads: "Nothing in this bucket yet."

Soft Conditional section: same layout, Maintain yellow tone throughout, sub-label "In play, not yet realized." Rows and the drilled detail view work identically, just tagged Soft Conditional instead of Hard Recoverable.

If there is nothing acted on at all in the window, before either section renders, the Decisions tab (which the Dollars tab shares its underlying data with) shows: "No decisions in this window yet. As IQ surfaces signals you act, park, or ignore, they show up here."

Where the numbers come from

Every dollar figure on Impact traces back to a decision (Verinode's term for a signal once it enters your decision lifecycle: surfaced, then acted, parked, or ignored). Only decisions marked acted inside the selected window contribute dollars, parked and ignored decisions never carry a dollar figure into these totals.

Two things determine what a decision contributes:

1. Which register it belongs to. Every decision is pre-classified as hard or soft at the point it is created, based on the kind of finding it represents. Supplements left on the table, vendor pricing gaps against peer norms, and similar underwrite-able, provable recoveries are Hard Recoverable. Conditional upside, compliance and certification-linked opportunity, and anything that depends on a future event or a peer comparison playing out is Soft Conditional. This classification is set once and does not shift depending on the window you are viewing.
2. What dollar amount it carries. Verinode prefers the realized outcome value if one has been recorded once the decision has run its course. If no realized figure exists yet, it falls back to the dollar estimate made at the time the decision was surfaced. A decision with neither carries no dollar amount and will not appear in either total, though it can still appear on the Decisions tab as an acted item with no dollar figure attached.

This is exactly why the two registers cannot be merged: a Hard Recoverable dollar has, by definition, already cleared the bar of being provable and underwrite-able. A Soft Conditional dollar has not, by definition, cleared that bar yet, whether because it is still moving through a carrier, still depends on a cross-referenced outcome, or is simply an estimate that has not yet resolved into a realized number. Summing them would quietly launder an unproven number into a proven one.

The bigger picture: Decisions and Engagement

The Dollars tab sits between two other tabs that give it context:

• Decisions shows the full lifecycle: how many signals IQ surfaced in the window, how many you acted on, parked, or ignored, and your action rate. Dollars only reflects the "acted" slice of that same set, so a low Dollars total alongside a high Surfaced count usually means there is unactioned work sitting in the Decisions tab, not that IQ found nothing.
• Engagement shows how you worked with IQ in the window: IQ Commands (conversations you started), IUs Spent (Intelligence Units consumed), Documents Added, Surveys sent and answered, and Time With IQ. None of these carry a dollar figure. They describe effort and usage, not recovered value.

Read together, Decisions tells you what IQ found, Dollars tells you what came of the decisions you acted on, split by how sure that value is, and Engagement tells you how much you leaned on IQ to get there.

Best-practice example

Say the hero panel this month reads Decisions Acted: 6, Hard Recoverable: $4,200, Soft Conditional: $9,800. Read that as two separate stories, not one $14,000 win. The $4,200 is money you can point to today: open the Dollars tab, and the Hard Recoverable section lists the specific acted decisions behind it, for example a vendor pricing correction and a supplement recovered on a closed job, each with its own dollar figure and a link into the full decision. The $9,800 is real work in motion, not yet cash: maybe a cost-position improvement still working its way through a renegotiated vendor contract, or a certification-linked opportunity that depends on carrier program eligibility. Track both, report the hard number with confidence, and treat the soft number as a pipeline to watch, not a number to bank on yet.

Data sources

Related

• Understanding your margin
• The decision workspace
• Acting on decisions
• The Feed