Biggest Gaps

What Biggest Gaps shows

Biggest Gaps is the last of the five aspects inside the Materials section, and the one built to answer a single question with no interpretation required: of everything you buy, which materials are actually costing you money against what operators like you pay, and how much is that worth in a year. Price vs Peers shows you a per-unit comparison, material by material. Biggest Gaps takes the same comparisons, keeps only the ones where you are paying above the peer median, multiplies each one by how much of that material you actually buy in a year, and ranks the result by dollars. It is the priority list version of the same data.

Verinode does not tell you which supplier to switch to or negotiate a new price for you. It reads your invoices, holds each price against operators like you, and ranks what is worth fixing first. You decide what to do with it.

Where to find it

Open Materials from the sidebar at /materials. Two ways into this aspect:

• The Explore row on the Materials home has five tiles: Price vs Peers, Your Suppliers, Spend Mix, Market Context, and Biggest Gaps (ember/red accent, the only red tile in the row). Tap it to open the aspect deck landed on this tab.
• Any opportunity tile in the Take Action row (up to three, one per material where you pay above operators like you) opens straight to this same tab when you tap it.

On web the deck opens as a card in the Materials slider; on mobile it opens as a deck slide. Both surfaces run the identical analysis from the same data, so nothing you see here differs by device.

The Biggest Gaps tile itself carries a preview number before you even open it: the total yearly dollars you could recover by closing every gap. Before that figure exists, it falls back to a count of materials priced above cohort, then to a dash, so the tile is never blank while the rest of your data is still filling in.

The list

When at least one material has a real gap, the aspect opens on a single line that both frames and totals the list:

"The materials where you pay above operators like you, ranked by yearly dollars at stake. Closing every gap is worth about [$X] a year at your volume."

Below that, one row per material, ranked with the biggest yearly dollar gap first. Unlike Price vs Peers, this list is not grouped into collapsible families, it is a flat, ranked priority list. Each row still carries its family name so you know what kind of material you are looking at.

Each row

• Name, on the left, the canonicalized material name (for example, a specific drywall thickness or a specific paint product).
• Family, a small caption under the name naming the material family it belongs to (Drywall & Finishing, Paint & Coatings, Fasteners, Lumber & Sheet Goods, Insulation, Roofing & Exterior, Floor Coverings, Tile & Masonry, Site Protection, Cleaning Chemicals, Restoration Consumables, PPE, or Fleet Build-out).
• Your price, top right, your own median unit price for that material over the trailing period, followed by the unit it is priced in, always in plain English (per gallon, per sheet, per square foot, and so on), never a raw unit code.
• The dollar-per-year figure, next to your price, reading in Ember Red, for example "$2,340/yr." This is not a per-unit delta, it is the annual dollar amount at stake for that specific material at your current volume.

The band bar

Under each row, the same peer-band bar used across Materials:

• A shaded segment marks the peer band, the 25th to 75th percentile of what the peer group pays for that material, the range where most operators like you land.
• A short vertical tick marks the peer median (p50) inside that band.
• A dot marks your price. Every dot on this tab is red-toned, because every row here is, by definition, a material where you are paying above the peer median. (On Price vs Peers, the same dot can be red or green depending on the direction; here it is always the red case, since a row would not appear on Biggest Gaps otherwise.)

The bar is scaled so your price, the band, and the median all fit with a little headroom, so a dot sitting well outside the shaded band reads as a real gap, not noise, at a glance.

How the dollar figure is built

The yearly figure behind every row is calculated the same way for every material:

Your annual units bought (how much of that material your invoices show you purchasing over the trailing 12 months) times the excess of your median unit price over the peer median. If you are at or below the peer median, the figure is zero and the material never appears here at all, it belongs on Price vs Peers instead, not on this list.

A few things worth being precise about:

• The comparison point is the peer median (p50), not the cheapest quartile. Closing a gap means getting to what a typical operator like you pays, not to the very best price anyone in the cohort has.
• Volume matters as much as price. A material where you are only a little above median but buy a large volume of can rank above a material where you are far above median but barely use, because the total is dollars-per-year, not dollars-per-unit. This is why Biggest Gaps and Price vs Peers can order the same materials differently.
• The total at the top of the aspect is a simple sum, it assumes you would close every gap at your current volume. It is not a forecast of what would happen to your volume or your prices if you switched suppliers.

Empty states

Biggest Gaps has two distinct empty states, depending on why the list is empty:

Peer pricing unlocked, but nothing is above cohort right now. The aspect reads, verbatim:

"No material where you pay above operators like you right now. Nice."

Peer pricing is not yet unlocked for your account. The aspect reads, verbatim:

"Peer pricing unlocks the gap between what you pay and what operators like you pay."

Related

• Price vs Peers: the per-unit read this aspect is built on, showing every material with a peer cohort, not just the ones costing you money.
• Your Suppliers: who you buy each material from, and what switching to a cheaper supplier for the same material is worth per year.
• Spend Mix: where your tracked material spend goes by category.
• Market Context: published reference prices, kept separate from the peer band that drives this aspect.
• The Materials section: how the hero panel, Take Action row, and Explore row fit together on the Materials home.
• How benchmarks work
• Reading a benchmark
• Acting on decisions
• Understanding your margin