Linking a material to a supplier

What a supplier link is

Every price Verinode shows you for a material, drywall mud, OSB, plastic sheeting, whatever you buy, has to be tied to the supplier you bought it from before a per-supplier comparison means anything. A supplier link is that tie: one row connecting one of your materials to one of your vendors, carrying the price history behind it (your median unit price, how many units, how recent the last invoice was).

Verinode builds most of these links itself. As your supplier invoices flow in, by email, upload, or QuickBooks, a nightly job reads the material and the vendor off each invoice line and derives the link automatically. You do not have to tell Verinode who you buy drywall mud from; it works that out from what you already send in. Verinode calls a link built this way "derived."

Two things can go wrong with a derived link, and both matter because they feed the same math that tells you which supplier is cheaper:

• A material gets matched to a vendor that is not really who supplies it, an invoice was parsed oddly, a vendor name was close to another one, and the link is simply wrong.
• Verinode has not derived a link at all yet for a material and supplier you know go together, because the invoices have not arrived, or the vendor name on them has not been recognized yet.

Verinode also lets you hold a link by hand, tagged "manual" instead of "derived." A manual link survives the nightly rebuild, so once you have said "this supplier sells me this material," Verinode will not re-derive over it or drop it. This article covers both sides: linking a material to a supplier yourself, and dismissing a link that should not be there.

Where to find it

Open Materials from the sidebar at iq.verinode.ai/materials. The Explore row includes a Your Suppliers tile, alongside Price vs Peers, Spend Mix, Market Context, and Biggest Gaps. Clicking it opens an overview: every material you have two or more suppliers for, cheapest one marked, in one scrollable list. That overview is read-only, it is the fast "who am I buying this from, and who's cheaper" read, not where you correct a link.

To act on a link, go to Benchmarks from the sidebar, open the Materials tab, and click into any priced material. That opens the same full metric detail view used across Benchmarks (see reading a benchmark), your median price against the peer band, the market reference, and, for materials only, a Your Suppliers panel underneath. This panel is where the dismiss control lives.

Reading the Your Suppliers panel

Each row is one supplier for that material:

• Supplier name, your own vendor name, this is always your data, never a peer's.
• Price, the supplier's median unit price from your invoices over the last 12 months, shown as dollars per unit (per Sq Ft, per Gallon, per Sheet, and so on, using the material's own unit). If Verinode has the link but not enough priced invoice lines yet, it reads "Price building" instead of a dollar figure.
• On the right, one of three reads:

- Your best, in green, when this supplier is your cheapest for this material. If two suppliers tie at your lowest price, both are marked. - ~$X/yr, to switch, in red, when moving this material's volume from this supplier to your cheapest alternative would save money at your current volume. This is what Verinode calls switch impact: your annual units at this supplier, multiplied by the gap between this supplier's price and your best alternative (your cheapest other supplier for the same material, or the peer median if you only have one supplier). It only shows when the gap is real and positive, a supplier that is already your cheapest, or one with no meaningful gap, shows nothing here. - Nothing at all, when neither applies.

• A small × button at the end of the row. That is the dismiss control, covered below.

Above the rows, if peer pricing is unlocked for this material, you will see the cohort's median price per unit for context (labeled cohort, an anonymized figure from operators like you, never a named competitor). Below the rows, a caption explains the panel in plain terms: "Prices from your own invoices, against your other suppliers and the peer median for the same material. Remove any that are not a supplier for this material."

Dismissing a link

Use dismiss when a supplier is linked to a material it should not be tied to, a bad match, a one-off invoice mistake, a vendor that used to supply it but no longer does.

1. 1Open Benchmarks → Materials and click into the material with the wrong link.
2. 2In the Your Suppliers panel, find the row for the supplier you want to remove.
3. 3Click the × at the end of that row. Verinode's tooltip on the button reads "Not a supplier for this material."
4. 4The row disappears immediately. Nothing else on the page needs a refresh, Verinode updates both Vendors and Benchmarks in the background so the change is reflected everywhere the link showed up.

What actually happens depends on how the link was made:

• If it was a derived link (the normal case, built from your invoices), Verinode marks it dismissed rather than deleting it outright. That matters because the nightly rollup keeps reading new invoices for that vendor and material combination, if it did not remember your dismissal, the same wrong match could simply reappear the next night. Once dismissed, it stays gone.
• If it was a manual link (one you had linked yourself), dismissing it deletes the row entirely. Since you created it by hand, there is nothing underneath for Verinode to keep suppressing.

Linking a material to a supplier by hand

The manual side of this is the flip of dismiss: telling Verinode directly that a given supplier is where a given material comes from, rather than waiting on the nightly invoice match. Verinode checks that the vendor you are linking is one of your own suppliers before saving the link, and the same link (one operator, one material, one vendor) is never duplicated, linking an existing pairing again simply reactivates it if it had been dismissed, or confirms it as manual if it was already active.

Once in place, a manual link behaves exactly like a derived one everywhere else in the product: it shows up in the Your Suppliers overview on Materials, it is priced and compared for cheapest/switch-impact in the Benchmarks deep dive, and it feeds the same per-material price history other tools read from. The only difference is durability, a manual link will not be overwritten or dropped by the nightly rebuild the way a mismatched derived link can be.

Empty states

• Materials → Your Suppliers, if you have no active supplier links for any material yet: "Your suppliers appear here as invoices identify who you buy each material from. Once two or more suppliers show up for the same material, you will see which one is cheaper."
• Materials home, Explore tile caption, before any supplier is linked: the tile reads ", " with the caption "suppliers appear from invoices."
• Benchmarks material detail, Your Suppliers panel, if there is no link at all for that material yet, the panel does not render, there is no empty box, just the price-vs-peers and market reference sections above it.

Why this matters

Every dollar figure in Materials, your median price, the gap against operators like you, the "worth about $X a year" line on a Take Action tile, is calculated at the material level, then split across suppliers only once the links are right. A material wrongly tied to a supplier inflates or hides that supplier's true price and can point switch-impact dollars at the wrong vendor. Keeping links accurate, dismissing bad ones, linking real ones by hand when the invoice match has not caught up, is what keeps "you pay Supplier A $18, Supplier B $15, here is what switching is worth" a number you can act on rather than a guess.

Related articles

• Benchmarks overview
• Reading a benchmark
• How benchmarks work
• Understanding your margin
• Connecting your data
• Forwarding documents