The Materials Take Action row

What the Take Action row is

Materials is a benchmark section, not a lifecycle section: it exists to answer one question, what do you pay per unit for the materials you buy, against what operators like you pay. The Take Action row is the first row under the Materials hero, and it is where that question turns into something to actually do. It holds up to five tiles, left to right:

1. A Talk to IQ tile that opens a live conversation with your Materials specialist.
2. An Unlock tile that lists the exact uploads that turn Materials on, or finish turning it on.
3. Up to three savings-opportunity tiles, one per material you are paying above the going rate for, ranked by how many dollars a year closing that gap is worth.

Verinode does not decide anything here. It reads the supplier invoices, bills, and payables you send it, holds each price against operators like you, and ranks the gaps by dollar size so you can choose where to spend your attention first.

Where to find it

Open Materials from the sidebar at iq.verinode.ai/materials. The Take Action row sits directly under the hero panel at the top of the page, above the Explore row (the five analytical tiles: Price vs Peers, Your Suppliers, Spend Mix, Market Context, Biggest Gaps).

The five tiles, in order

1. Talk to IQ

What it is. The first tile in the row on every section of the platform, not just Materials, styled as a full-bleed "album cover" rather than a data tile: a copper gradient over a dark background with the Materials glyph watermarked in the corner.

What you see. The small uppercase eyebrow reads Start here. The large headline reads Talk to IQ. Underneath, one line states what your Materials specialist watches: "I watch what you pay for materials and show you the low, median, and high that operators like you pay." An Ask IQ pill sits at the bottom with a small arrow.

What it does. Clicking it opens the IQ agent panel on the right side of the screen with a seed message already loaded, written as your fractional COO opening the conversation on materials for the first time. It introduces itself, states plainly that it has nothing to read yet, asks for the single fastest way in (forward a supplier invoice, or connect QuickBooks), previews what happens the moment something lands (every line gets read, your materials get sorted by what you spend most on, and it flags where you're paying above the going rate and what closing that gap is worth per year), then asks an open question to get you typing back.

When it disappears. Once you click it, or once you have any conversation history with the Materials specialist from anywhere else on the platform, the tile retires for good in that browser. It is an onboarding nudge, not permanent furniture. If you sign in from a different device, you may see it once more there, the same one-time nudge on a fresh browser.

2. Unlock (Make Your Materials Spend Work / Deepen Your Materials Spend)

What it is. A copper-outlined tile that names the exact data Materials needs and tracks, source by source, what you have already sent in.

Materials needs two things to fully switch on:

• Supplier Invoices, forward your supplier invoices to your Verinode inbound address. This unlocks per-unit prices against the cohort, ranked by yearly dollars.
• Bills And Payables, a QuickBooks bill export or an A/P aging export. This rounds out the spend picture so the savings ranking is accurate (a materials view built off invoices alone can miss purchases that only show up as a paid bill).

What you see. The tile has three states:

• No sources in at all. The eyebrow reads Make Your Materials Spend Work, the headline reads Upload Your Data To Switch It On, and underneath a promise line spells out what you get: "What you pay per unit for drywall, paint, fasteners, and more, against the low, median, and high for operators like you, by region." Below that, a short checklist names both missing sources: each shows an open circle, the source's label in bold, and the tool to send it from (for example, "Supplier Invoices · Forwarded Supplier Invoices").
• Some sources in, not all. The eyebrow reads Deepen Your Materials Spend, and the headline counts what's in: "1 Of 2 Sources In. Add The Rest." A source that has arrived shows a filled green checkmark next to its label and "· in"; a source still missing keeps the open-circle row with its tool name.
• Both sources in. The tile disappears entirely. Materials is considered fully set up and the nudge has done its job.

A button at the bottom reads Add Data in the fully-cold state, or Add What's Missing once at least one source has landed. Either one opens the same data-capture modal as the Send data button in the page header, so there is no separate upload flow to learn.

Empty state for the row itself. The tile briefly renders nothing while it checks your data on load, then appears in whichever of the three states applies. If a check fails (a network hiccup, for instance), the tile also renders nothing rather than show a stale or wrong state.

3–5. The three savings-opportunity tiles

What they are. After the Talk to IQ and Unlock tiles, the row fills in with up to three decision tiles, one for each material where you are currently paying above what operators like you pay, ranked highest dollar-impact first. These only appear once you have at least one material with a real, positive dollar gap against the cohort; a material sitting at or below the peer median never gets a tile here, no matter how much you spend on it.

Each tile is built to stand out from the plain data tiles elsewhere on the page: a solid colored rail runs down the left edge, and the label at the top renders as a filled pill instead of a plain caption, both colored in Ember Red, the platform's signal color for "this needs attention." That is a deliberate visual escalation, not a warning about anything being wrong with your data.

What each tile shows:

• Label (top pill). The material family the item belongs to, for example "Drywall & Finishing," "Paint & Coatings," or "Fasteners."
• Headline. A single sentence stating the gap in plain terms: "You pay $X per [unit] for [material name]. Operators like you pay $Y." The unit is whatever that material is priced in, humanized (Gallon, Sheet, Each, Box, Pound, Roll, Sq Ft, Linear Ft, and so on), never a raw code. Dollar figures are formatted the same way throughout the row: amounts of a million or more show as "$X.XM," amounts of a thousand or more show as "$Xk," very small unit prices show to the cent (for example "$4.25"), and everything else shows as a whole dollar figure with thousand separators.
• Sub-line. "Worth about $Z a year at your volume," the dollar difference between what you pay and the peer figure, multiplied by how many units of that material you actually buy in a trailing 12-month window. This is the number the tiles are ranked by.
• Meta line (when present). A confidence label alongside how many operators the comparison is drawn from. The label reflects how much peer data backs that specific price: a thinner cohort reads with a lighter-confidence label, a deeper one reads with a stronger one. Treat a lighter-confidence read as directional and a stronger one as something you can act on with more certainty; either way, the dollar figure above it is never shown unless there is at least some real peer data behind it.

What clicking a tile does. Every one of the three tiles opens the same place: the Biggest Gaps card in the Materials Explore deck, in-page (no navigation away from /materials). That card lists every material where you are paying above cohort, not just the top three, so from there you can work down the full list instead of only the headline gaps.

What to do. Read top to bottom, the row is already ranked by yearly dollars, so the first tile is the largest opportunity you have right now. Click it to reach the Biggest Gaps card, and treat the sub-line dollar figure as the annual prize for closing that one gap, whether that means renegotiating with a supplier, switching suppliers, or buying in different quantities.

Empty states, start to finish

• Day 1, nothing sent yet. Only the Talk to IQ and Unlock tiles show. No savings tiles appear because there is no purchase data to compare. Peer prices for common restoration materials still show up elsewhere on the page (the hero and the Explore row lead with market reference so the section is never fully blank), but the Take Action row itself waits for your own purchases.
• Some invoices in, no material yet above cohort. The Unlock tile may still show (partial state) if you have not sent both sources, or it may have retired if both are in. No savings tiles show until at least one of your materials prices above the peer median by a real dollar amount.
• Fully set up, no gaps left. Once both Unlock inputs are in and every material you buy is at or below cohort, the Unlock tile is gone and no savings tiles appear. If you have also already talked to IQ about materials, the Talk to IQ tile is gone too. The row's title still shows above the row, even if nothing is left inside it, that is expected: it means Materials genuinely has nothing left to nudge you about right now.

Best-practice example

Say you open Materials and see two things you have already sent in (Supplier Invoices and Bills And Payables, so the Unlock tile has retired) and three savings tiles: Drywall & Finishing at the top worth the most a year, then Paint & Coatings, then Fasteners. Click the Drywall & Finishing tile. It opens the Biggest Gaps card, in-page, showing every drywall and finishing item priced above cohort, not just the headline one. From there you have what you need for the actual conversation with your supplier: your price, the peer figure, and what the gap is worth annualized. If you would rather think it through first, click Talk to IQ (if it is still showing) and ask your Materials specialist to walk the numbers with you before you make the call.

Data sources

Related reading

• How benchmarks work
• Reading a benchmark
• Benchmarks overview
• Understanding your margin
• The decision workspace
• Acting on decisions
• Connecting your data
• Forwarding documents