Working a playbook: acknowledge, start, complete, or decline

What this page is

When your franchise network sends you something to work on, whether that's a playbook, a directive, a recommendation, or an experiment, it lands as a single detail page at /network/playbooks/<planId>. That page is where you read what your franchisor sent, see where it stands, and move it forward: acknowledge it, start it, mark it done, or decline it with a note. Verinode does not decide any of this for you. The franchisor pushes the content; you own every status change on your copy of it.

Each playbook you're working shows up as its own page. There's no shared "board", each plan you've been sent has its own record, its own timestamps, and its own notes, scoped to your account.

Where to find it

• Network Playbooks in the sidebar, with a count badge next to it. The entry only appears when you have at least one playbook still open (pushed, acknowledged, or in progress). Once every playbook you've been sent is either completed or declined, the sidebar entry disappears, there is nothing left needing your attention.
• Clicking that sidebar entry (or going to /network/playbooks directly) opens the Network playbooks inbox: every plan your franchisor has ever pushed to you, split into two groups, Active (still needs your attention) and Closed (declined or completed). Click any row to open its detail page.
• A push notification in your Feed links straight to the detail page for the specific plan that was just sent to you.

If your franchisor hasn't sent you anything yet, the inbox reads:

"Your franchise network hasn't sent you any playbooks yet."

What's on the detail page

At the top of the page, a row of pills tells you three things at a glance: the kind of plan (Playbook, Directive, Recommendation, or Experiment), its current status (see the state machine below), and who sent it, "From \[group name\]". Below that sits the plan's title as the page headline, then a Detail section with the body text your franchisor wrote. If they pushed the plan without any body copy, that section instead reads:

"Your franchise network sent this \[kind\] without additional detail."

(with "playbook," "directive," "recommendation," or "experiment" filled in, matching the kind pill above it).

Your notes

If you've ever left a note on this plan, most commonly when declining it, it's echoed back here under a Your notes heading so you (and your franchisor) can see exactly what you wrote, verbatim, whitespace and all.

Lifecycle

A four-column timestamp strip near the bottom of the page shows the full history of this plan on your account:

• Pushed, the date your franchisor sent it to you.
• Acknowledged, the date you first acknowledged it (blank until you do).
• Started, the date you moved it to in progress (blank until you do).
• The fourth column is Declined or Completed, whichever applies, showing whichever of those two happened. If neither has happened yet, it still shows as "Completed" until the plan resolves one way or the other.

Any date that hasn't happened yet renders as a single dash placeholder (, ) rather than blank space, so the four-column layout stays intact regardless of how far along the plan is. Dates are formatted like "Jul 11, 2026."

The state machine: what you can do at each stage

A playbook's adoption status only moves forward, and only along specific paths. There's no free-form status field, and no rewinding once you decline or complete a plan on your side:

| Current status | You can move it to | |---|---| | Pushed to you | Acknowledged, In progress, or Declined | | Acknowledged | In progress, or Declined | | In progress | Completed, or Declined | | Completed | Nothing further. This is terminal. | | Declined | Nothing further. This is terminal. |

A few things follow from that table:

• You can go straight from Pushed to you to In progress without stopping at Acknowledged first. If you do, Verinode stamps your acknowledgment timestamp at the same moment as your started timestamp, so the record still shows you engaged with it, it just collapses the "I saw this" and "I'm working it" moments into one click.
• Completed is only reachable from In progress. There's no button that jumps a plan straight from Pushed or Acknowledged to Completed, you have to move it to In progress first.
• Both Completed and Declined are dead ends on your account. Once a plan lands there, the Update status controls disappear from the page entirely, there is nothing left to click. If your circumstances change and you want to revisit a declined plan, talk to your franchisor, since only they control what gets pushed.

How to move a playbook forward

1. 1Open the playbook from Network Playbooks in the sidebar or from a Feed notification.
2. 2Read the Detail section. If your franchisor attached an IU sponsorship (see below), note the remaining sponsored balance before you open IQ to work the plan.
3. 3Under Update status, click the button matching where you actually are: "Mark acknowledged" if you've just read it and haven't started, "Mark in progress" once you're actively working it, or "Mark completed" once it's done. Buttons only appear for the statuses you're actually allowed to move to from where you are.
4. 4If you're not going to work this plan, click Decline instead (see below) rather than leaving it sitting open indefinitely.
5. 5The page refreshes in place after every status change, no reload needed, and the Lifecycle strip immediately shows the new timestamp.

Declining, with a note

Clicking Decline doesn't submit anything immediately. It swaps the button row for an inline form: a heading reading "Decline, optional note," a text box, and two buttons, Cancel and Confirm decline. The placeholder text in the box reads:

"Why are you declining? (Optional, your franchisor can see this.)"

The note is genuinely optional, you can click Confirm decline with the box empty. Whatever you type is saved to your account's copy of the plan and shown back to you under Your notes the next time you (or your franchisor, on their side) view it. Clicking Cancel discards the form and returns you to the normal status buttons without recording anything.

While a status change is saving, the button you clicked shows "Saving…" (or "Submitting…" for a decline) and the controls disable until the update lands or fails. If a status update fails for any reason, an error line appears at the bottom of the page and nothing about the plan changes, you can retry.

IU sponsorship on this playbook

Some plans come with AI help your franchisor has already paid for. When that's the case, a Sponsorship block appears above the Lifecycle strip, headed "Sponsorship, \[group name\] is covering AI help on this playbook," with three figures side by side:

• Budget, the total IUs your franchisor committed to this plan, on your account.
• Used, how many of those sponsored IUs have been drawn so far.
• Remaining, budget minus used (never shown below zero).

Underneath, a line explains how it works: "Open the IQ panel from this page to use the sponsored IUs. Your own balance only kicks in once the sponsor cap is reached." In practice, that means as long as you're chatting with IQ from this specific playbook's page, your questions and work on it draw from your franchisor's sponsored pool first. Your own monthly IU balance is only touched once that sponsored budget runs out. If a plan carries no sponsorship, this block simply doesn't render, there's nothing to configure on your end either way.

Access and privacy

You can only ever see a plan your franchisor actually pushed to your account. If you land on a /network/playbooks/<planId> link that isn't yours, whether it's mistyped, stale, or was never sent to you, Verinode doesn't reveal whether the plan exists at all. Instead you see:

Not available

"This playbook isn't associated with your account. If you think this is a mistake, ask your franchise network admin to confirm they pushed it to your operator profile."

with a link back to your Network playbooks inbox. This is deliberate: the only thing that grants you visibility into a plan is your own adoption record for it, not the plan's ID or content.

Best-practice example

Your franchisor pushes a Directive: a new adjuster-communication cadence they want rolled out network-wide, with a modest IU budget attached to help you draft the first few templates. It shows up under Active in your Network playbooks inbox, and the sidebar badge ticks up by one. You open it, read the Detail section, and click "Mark acknowledged" so your franchisor's rollout dashboard shows you've seen it. A few days later you actually start drafting templates, so you open the IQ panel from that same page (drawing on the sponsored budget instead of your own IUs) and click "Mark in progress." Once the cadence is live on your jobs, you click "Mark completed." If instead this cadence duplicated something you'd already built in-house, you'd click Decline and leave a one-line note, "Already running an equivalent cadence since Q1," so your franchisor knows why without a call.

Related

• The decision workspace
• Acting on decisions
• The Feed