Price vs Peers

What Price vs Peers shows

Price vs Peers is the first of five aspects inside the Materials section. It answers one question, material by material: for each thing you buy from a supplier, what do you pay per unit, and where does that sit against operators like you? It is the read that turns a pile of supplier invoices into a plain judgment, not just a price list.

Every number on this aspect comes from your own document line items (invoices tagged as material purchases, canonicalized against Verinode's shared material catalog) and, where a peer group exists, that group's own contributed prices. Verinode never blends a published market price into the peer read here. Market prices live on their own aspect, Market Context, kept deliberately separate so this comparison is always operator-to-operator.

Where to find it

Open Materials from the sidebar (/materials). The Explore row near the top has five tiles: Price vs Peers, Your Suppliers, Spend Mix, Market Context, and Biggest Gaps. Tap the Price vs Peers tile (teal accent) to open it. On web it opens as a card in the Materials slider; on mobile it opens as a deck slide. Both surfaces show the identical analysis, built from the same data.

The Price vs Peers tile itself carries a preview number even before you open it: a count of materials priced against operators like you, or, if none are priced against peers yet, a count of your own tracked prices, or a count of market references to start from.

The list: grouped by family, one row per material

Once you have at least one material priced against a peer group, the aspect opens on a short line: how many materials are priced against operators like you, with a note that the band shows where most of them land and the dot is you.

Below that, materials are grouped into families, collapsible sections you tap to open. A family is a category of materials that behave alike, like Drywall & Finishing, Paint & Coatings, Fasteners, Lumber & Sheet Goods, Insulation, Roofing & Exterior, Floor Coverings, Tile & Masonry, Site Protection, Cleaning Chemicals, Restoration Consumables, PPE, and Fleet Build-out. Each family header shows its name and how many priced materials sit inside it. The first family in the list opens automatically; the rest stay collapsed so a long list of materials stays scannable instead of turning into one long scroll. Tap any family header to open or close it.

Within a family, materials are sorted alphabetically by name.

Each material row

Every row in the list is one canonical material (for example, a specific drywall thickness or a specific paint product), and shows:

• Name, on the left, the canonicalized material name.
• A small operator-count note, under the name, shown only once enough peer data exists for that specific material. It tells you how many operators' prices are feeding that material's comparison, so you can judge at a glance how thick the peer read is before you act on it.
• Your price, top right, your own median unit price for that material over the trailing period, followed by the unit it is priced in (per gallon, per sheet, per square foot, and so on, always in plain English, never a raw unit code).
• The delta line, next to your price, reading how far your price sits from the peer median in dollars, for example a plus figure if you pay more or a minus figure if you pay less, labeled "vs median." This line is colored: red-toned when you are paying above median, green-toned when you are paying below it.

The band bar

Under each row, a thin horizontal bar visualizes the comparison:

• A shaded segment marks the peer band, running from the 25th percentile (p25) to the 75th percentile (p75) of what the peer group pays for that material. This is the range where most operators like you land, roughly the middle half of the group, not the full spread of every price ever seen.
• A short vertical tick marks the peer median (p50) inside that band, the price right at the middle of the group.
• A small dot marks your price, positioned along the same scale. The dot is colored to match the delta line: red-toned if you are paying above the peer median, green-toned if you are paying below it, copper-toned when there is no clear read either way.

The whole bar is scaled so the highest of your price, the band, and the median fits comfortably, with a little headroom, so the visual proportions are honest at a glance: a dot near the right edge of the band means you are near the top of what peers pay for that material, and a dot to the left of the band means you are meaningfully cheaper than most.

How to read a row, concretely

Say a drywall row shows your price at $14.20 per sheet, a delta of "+$1.85 vs median" in red, and a band bar with the peer band sitting to the left of your dot. That reads as: for this specific drywall product, you are paying about two dollars more per sheet than the typical operator like you, and your dot sitting outside the shaded band (rather than inside it) tells you that gap is not just noise, most peers are clustered meaningfully below where you sit. A row with a green "-$0.40 vs median" and your dot inside or to the left of the band reads the opposite way: you are already buying that material at or better than the going rate among peers.

The dollar delta is per unit, not per year. To see the same gaps expressed as annual dollars at stake (delta times how many units you actually buy), open the Biggest Gaps aspect, which ranks the same underlying comparisons by yearly dollar impact. Price vs Peers is the per-unit read; Biggest Gaps is the same data turned into a priority list.

Empty state

Until enough operators like you have contributed invoices for the specific materials you buy, the aspect reads:

"Peer pricing appears here once enough operators like you contribute invoices for the materials you buy. Your own prices are always tracked."

Your own prices are never blocked by this: Verinode tracks every material line from your own invoices regardless of whether a peer comparison exists yet for that item. The peer band is what is gated, and only until a peer group forms for that specific material.

What feeds this aspect

• Your own material line items, pulled from parsed supplier invoices over the trailing 12 months, canonicalized against the shared material catalog and normalized to a common unit so a gallon is always compared to a gallon.
• The peer group's contributed prices for the same canonical material, drawn from the same operator "world" you're in (a demo account only ever sees demo peers; a real account only ever sees real peers, so the numbers you see are never mixed across the two).
• Nothing here is sold onward. Verinode is an independent data trust: your prices contribute to the anonymized peer group the same way every other operator's do, and that group's aggregate never goes to carriers or suppliers.

Related

• Your Suppliers: who you buy each material from and which supplier is cheapest when you have more than one.
• Spend Mix: where your tracked material spend goes by category.
• Market Context: published reference prices, shown separately from the peer band.
• Biggest Gaps: the same price comparisons ranked by yearly dollars at stake.
• How benchmarks work
• Reading a benchmark
• Understanding your margin