Spend Mix

What Spend Mix shows

Spend Mix is the third of five aspects inside the Materials section. It answers a different question from the other four: not what you pay per unit, and not who is cheapest, but where your money actually went. Over the trailing 12 months, how much did you spend on drywall versus paint versus fasteners versus lumber, and which category is quietly the biggest line in your materials budget?

Every dollar in Spend Mix comes from your own supplier invoices: document lines tagged as a material purchase, matched to Verinode's shared material catalog, and rolled up by category. There is no peer comparison on this aspect and no unlock gate. Whether or not peer pricing is available for the materials you buy, your own spend always shows in full, because it is your data.

Where to find it

Open Materials from the sidebar at /materials. The Explore row near the top has five tiles: Price vs Peers, Your Suppliers, Spend Mix, Market Context, and Biggest Gaps. Tap the Spend Mix tile (copper 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 render the identical breakdown, built from the same data.

The Spend Mix tile itself carries a preview number before you even open it: your total tracked material spend over the trailing 12 months (for example "$84k tracked spend, 12 months"). If nothing has been tracked yet, it falls back to a dash with the caption "spend appears from invoices."

What you see: one bar per category, largest first

Once you have any tracked material spend, the aspect opens on a single line naming your total: "Where your $X of tracked material spend went over the last 12 months, by category." Below that, one row per material category (Verinode calls these material families), always sorted with the biggest spender at the top and the smallest at the bottom. Unlike Price vs Peers, which groups materials in a fixed family order so the same category always sits in the same place, Spend Mix reorders itself around your actual dollars: whichever category you spend the most on this month is the category you see first.

The families that can appear are 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. A material that cannot be matched to any of those groups falls under Other Materials rather than being dropped.

Each row

Every row shows three things:

• The category label, on the left, for example "Drywall & Finishing" or "Paint & Coatings."
• The dollar total, top right, bold: how much you spent in that category over the trailing 12 months.
• A filled bar underneath, sized to that category's share of your total spend. A category responsible for 40% of your spend gets a bar roughly 40% of full width; a category responsible for 3% still shows a thin visible sliver rather than disappearing, so every category you spend on stays legible even when it is a small share of the whole. Each bar is tinted with the accent color assigned to that family, the same accent used for that family elsewhere in Materials, so the strongest colors in the list are also usually the longest bars.

There is no operator count, no peer band, and no confidence label on this aspect. Spend Mix is entirely about your own dollars, so there is nothing here that depends on how many other operators have contributed data.

How the total and each category are built

The total spend figure, and each category's slice of it, is built the same way:

1. Verinode pulls every document line item you have on file tagged as a material purchase (category = material) with a positive unit price, dated within the trailing 365 days.
2. Each line is matched to a canonical material in the shared restoration materials catalog, the same matching step used by Price vs Peers and Biggest Gaps, so the same purchase is never split or duplicated across categories because of how two different suppliers happened to word it.
3. For each matched line, Verinode adds up the dollars actually paid (the line's total price when your invoice carries one, or unit price times quantity when it does not), not a recomputed or normalized unit price. Spend Mix is a spend total, not a pricing comparison, so it reflects exactly what left your account.
4. Every matched line rolls into its material's family, and every family's lines sum into that family's bar.

Because this aspect counts every matched material line regardless of whether a peer cohort exists for it, a category can show a large bar here even while its materials still read "Early signal" or show no peer band at all on Price vs Peers. Spend Mix and Price vs Peers are reading two different things: one is where the money went, the other is whether the price you paid for it was competitive.

A material line that cannot be matched to the catalog, an unusual description, a material outside the current restoration catalog, is excluded from every category's total until it can be matched. That is the same normalization limit that applies everywhere in Materials, not a sign your invoice failed to send.

How to read it, concretely

Say your Spend Mix opens with a total of $92k across five categories, and the top bar reads "Roofing & Exterior, $38k," about 41% of the total, with "Drywall & Finishing" second at $21k. That tells you nearly four in ten tracked material dollars over the last year went to roofing and exterior materials, more than double the next category. That is worth knowing on its own, it tells you where your negotiating leverage and supplier relationships matter most, but it does not by itself tell you whether you are paying a fair price for that spend. For that, open Price vs Peers and look inside the Roofing & Exterior group, or open Biggest Gaps to see whether any of that $38k includes prices sitting above what operators like you pay for the same materials.

Empty state

Until Verinode has identified at least one canonicalizable material purchase from your invoices, the aspect reads exactly:

"Your material spend by category appears here as supplier invoices come in."

This is the same day-one state the rest of Materials is in before your first matched purchase: nothing to allocate yet because nothing has been categorized yet. It clears the moment your first supplier invoice is parsed and matched to the catalog.

How to use it

1. 1Open Spend Mix to see, in one glance, which material categories carry the most of your yearly spend, largest first.
2. 2Treat a large bar as a flag for where supplier relationships and pricing scrutiny matter most, a five percent price drift on your biggest category is worth far more in dollars than the same drift on a small one.
3. 3Cross-reference the categories with real weight here against Price vs Peers, to see whether your price on those specific materials sits above, at, or below what operators like you pay.
4. 4Check Biggest Gaps for the same categories, to see whether any of that spend already carries a quantified yearly opportunity.
5. 5If a category you know you buy heavily does not show up, or shows less than expected, check that recent invoices for it have actually been sent in, rather than assuming the category is genuinely small.

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.
• Nothing from the peer network and nothing from published market references. Spend Mix is entirely your own data, always visible regardless of unlock state, because it never touches the peer intelligence layer.

Related reading

• Price vs Peers: whether your price on the categories you spend the most on is competitive.
• Your Suppliers: who you buy each material from and which supplier is cheapest when you have more than one.
• Market Context: published reference prices, shown separately from any peer band.
• Biggest Gaps: the same materials ranked by yearly dollars at stake where you pay above peers.
• The Materials section
• How benchmarks work
• Understanding your margin
• Connecting your data
• Forwarding documents