Adding a process: upload, paste, or let Verinode find it

What this covers

A Standard Operating Procedure only helps your business if it exists somewhere other than a senior tech's head. This article covers the three things that turn a document, a photo, a voice memo, or pasted text into a scored, documented process inside Verinode: the capture flow itself, the LEAN analysis Verinode runs on every saved SOP, and the workflow-template model that matches a documented procedure against a known-good reference sequence for its category.

Verinode does not write your procedures. It reads what you send, structures it, scores it against LEAN principles and IICRC standards, and hands the result back for you to confirm. You stay the author.

Where to find it

Open Processes from the sidebar at iq.verinode.ai/processes. Two buttons sit in the page header, top right:

• + Add Process, a copper button that opens the capture modal titled "Send data to Processes." This is the button this article is built around.
• Add Data, the universal data-entry button every section carries. It opens the identical modal on the Processes page, so it's a second door into the same flow rather than a different one.

The capture modal: four ways in

Clicking + Add Process opens a modal with a row of tabs across the top. On the Processes page, four tabs are available (the modal's fifth tab, Forward, only appears on pages that carry your personal forwarding email, which Processes does not):

1. 1Drop files. A dashed drop zone reads "Drop a file here" with "or click to browse" underneath. Drag a file onto it or click to open a file browser. Below it, a Send multiple at once button lets you queue several files for a bulk import in one go. The accepted-format note reads: "PDF, images, CSV, Excel, Word, video, audio: Verinode reads everything." A single file is capped at 25 MB; past that the modal shows "File exceeds 25 MB limit" and stops.
2. 2Snap a photo. A single button reads "Snap a photo" with the sub-line "Receipts, invoices, certs, equipment tags." On a phone this opens the camera directly; on a laptop it opens your image picker. Good for a photographed checklist page or a whiteboard walkthrough on the shop wall.
3. 3Paste it. A text box with the placeholder "Paste email text, invoice details, or any business document content..." Paste in a procedure copied from an old Word document or notes from a training session. The Analyze button stays disabled until you've typed at least 10 characters; under that, the modal shows "Text too short (min 10 characters)."
4. 4Tell me. A microphone button. Tap it to start recording ("Tap to record," with the prompt "Describe a cost, dictate notes, or walk through a job"), tap again to stop. While recording, the button turns red and the label counts up ("Recording... 0:14"). If your browser or device won't grant microphone access, the modal shows "Microphone access denied" instead. This tab is the fastest way to capture a real walkthrough: have a supervisor talk through the mitigation checklist out loud, and Verinode transcribes and structures it.

What happens after you submit

The moment you drop a file, snap a photo, paste text, or stop a recording, the modal fires a toast ("Uploading [filename], Verinode is analyzing it now…," or "…transcribing now…" for audio and video) and closes immediately. You aren't stuck watching a spinner: a persistent card at the bottom of the screen tracks progress in the background, then flips to the result once it lands. A single file usually finishes in 8 to 30 seconds; a bulk batch processes one file at a time.

Behind the scenes:

1. Photo, drop, and paste each route through Verinode's canonical ingestion pipeline, the same classifier and extractor every document type on the platform uses. Voice and video are transcribed first (anonymized before the transcript reaches the language model), then routed through that same pipeline tagged as spoken-word input.
2. When the pipeline recognizes a procedure, checklist, or protocol, it structures the content into a title, a category (Water Mitigation, Fire & Smoke, Mold Remediation, Reconstruction, Contents, or General), a work type (residential, commercial, or both), and an ordered list of steps. Each step gets its own description, the role responsible for it (Lead Technician, Crew Member, Project Manager, Estimator, Subcontractor, Office, or other), an estimated time in minutes, and any equipment called out.
3. How confident Verinode is in its own read decides how the new SOP lands:

- High confidence (roughly 80% or higher): the SOP goes live immediately. - Moderate confidence (roughly 50 to 79%): the SOP still saves and is visible, but is flagged for you to review before it counts as active guidance. - Low confidence (under roughly 50%): the same review flag applies, plus a note asking you to double-check the source or resubmit.

1. The moment the SOP row is written, LEAN analysis kicks off automatically in the background (see the next section), regardless of which confidence tier it landed in. Even a needs-review SOP gets scored.
2. That structure also writes a second, separate record: an artifact-anchored observation tied back to the exact photo, recording, or pasted text it came from. This is Verinode's behavioral read of how you actually work, kept apart from your documented SOP library on purpose. It's raw material an analyst pass clusters over time and asks you to confirm before anything from it becomes part of your process model. A single capture doesn't create a confirmable pattern by itself; repetition across enough captures is what surfaces a pattern card on the Processes home for you to confirm, edit and confirm, or dismiss.

Reading the result

Once processing finishes, the modal (if you kept it open) or the Recent list (if you closed it) shows a result card:

• A status icon and headline: "Got it: [summary of what was extracted]." Green checkmark for a clean read, amber for one flagged for review, blue for one still queued.
• Matched: any entities Verinode recognized in the content, each tagged with its type.
• Warnings, in amber, when something came back incomplete: a partial import, or a piece of content it couldn't confidently place. These exist so a partial result never quietly reads as a full success.
• Insights, short flagged lines with a severity marker for anything that needs a closer look.
• A next step suggestion in a gray box: a one-line nudge toward what tends to compound value from what you just sent.
• Two buttons: Send another (resets the modal for a new capture) and Done (closes it).

The SOP analyzer: how LEAN scoring works

Every SOP, whether it arrived as an upload, a photo, pasted text, or a transcribed recording, gets run through the same analysis once its steps are saved. This is what produces the LEAN Score you'll see on the SOP's detail card.

The score itself. LEAN Score runs 0 to 100. A well-run restoration SOP typically scores in the 55 to 75 range; 100 would be a perfectly LEAN procedure with no wasted motion or ambiguity, 0 would be highly wasteful. Under the number, a delta line reads either "+N above LEAN standard" or "N below LEAN standard," showing how far the SOP sits from a fully LEAN-compliant reference.

Framework Scores. When a category maps to a recognized industry standard, Verinode scores the SOP against that standard too, alongside its LEAN score:

| Framework | What it checks | |---|---| | IICRC S500 | Water damage restoration: extraction sequencing, psychrometric monitoring, drying goals, moisture documentation | | IICRC S520 | Mold remediation: containment, air filtration, PPE, removal procedures, clearance testing | | IICRC S770 | Fire and smoke restoration: content evaluation, structural cleaning, deodorization, documentation | | OSHA | 29 CFR 1910/1926: PPE requirements, confined space procedures, hazard communication, fall protection |

Each active framework gets its own 0-100 score with the same scale as LEAN.

Waste Signals. Verinode's analysis is built on LEAN's eight classic wastes, adapted for restoration field work. Each flagged waste names the step it affects, which waste type it is, a plain description of why it's waste, and a concrete suggestion to fix it:

• Waiting: a step where the crew stalls on an unstated trigger
• Transportation: unnecessary movement of people, materials, or equipment
• Motion: wasted physical movement within a step
• Defects: rework caused by an earlier step done wrong
• Over-processing: doing more than the job requires
• Overproduction: producing documentation or output before it's needed
• Inventory: equipment or materials sitting idle
• Skills: a step performed by the wrong role, underusing someone's actual training

The analysis deliberately does not flag physics-driven waiting (drying time genuinely takes as long as it takes); it only flags waiting a process choice created.

Top Recommendations. Up to three concrete, actionable fixes, often citing the specific IICRC section a gap falls under.

The workflow-template model behind category matching

Underneath the SOP library sits a catalog of reference workflow templates: pre-built sequences of steps, gates, and roles for common restoration processes, each tagged to a category the same way your captured SOPs are (water, fire, general, and so on). This is the model that lets Verinode recognize what a "good" version of a given category's process looks like, and it's the reference structure behind the framework scores above.

Each template defines:

• A category, matched the same way an SOP's category is: an exact category match, or a general-purpose template that applies across every category regardless of its own tag.
• A trigger, the event that would kick the workflow off: a new job being created, a job's status changing, a document arriving, a payment landing, an SLA deadline approaching, or a manual start.
• An ordered set of steps, each typed as a task, a gate (must pass before the next step can proceed), a notification, a wait (an SLA timer), a decision (branches on a condition), or a documentation step. Every step names the role responsible, an estimated time, whether it's required, and any SLA minutes before it escalates.

The reference templates cover water mitigation (following IICRC S500: initial contact and dispatch through moisture mapping, extraction, drying equipment placement, daily monitoring, a drying-goals gate, equipment pickup, and final documentation), fire and smoke restoration (following IICRC S770: safety assessment, damage assessment, contents pack-out, demolition, cleaning, deodorization, and final documentation), plus three general-purpose templates that aren't tied to a single loss category: a payment follow-up cadence that escalates based on a carrier's own historical days-to-pay, a team offboarding checklist, and a supplement decision workflow that checks a carrier's approval-rate history before committing filing effort.

This catalog is the matching model, not a switch you flip. Its purpose is to give Verinode a known-good structure to check a documented or observed process against for its category, the same reference logic that produces the IICRC framework scores on your SOP detail card. As the automation layer on top of it matures, it's designed to be the foundation for suggesting or attaching the right workflow automatically once a job lands in a given category.

Best-practice example

Say your best estimator has never written down how she scopes a water loss; it's all in her head after a decade of jobs. Instead of asking her to type up a formal SOP (which never happens), open Processes, click + Add Process, and hand her the Tell me tab. She talks through her walkthrough for four minutes: moisture readings first, photos before any equipment moves, a specific order for tear-out decisions. Verinode transcribes it, structures it into a titled SOP with individual steps and equipment, and saves it (flagged for her to confirm if the read came back at moderate confidence). Within moments, the LEAN analyzer scores it against LEAN and IICRC S500, flags a waiting-waste gap where the ambiguity between inspection and extraction could stall a crew, and hands back three recommendations, one of them citing the exact S500 section her sequence was missing. She fixes the gap in the step editor, and the score updates in the background.

Related articles

• Adding a process
• The Coverage tab: which service lines have an SOP
• By Standard: your IICRC, LEAN, OSHA, EPA, and state library
• How your work flows: process mining on your jobs
• The decision workspace
• Forwarding documents
• Connecting your data