SOPs that touch a client, vendor, teammate, or asset

What this covers

Every standard operating procedure (SOP) you document in Processes is written about something: the vendor you dry alongside, the team member who leads the crew, the equipment unit you deploy, the carrier or TPA the job bills to. Two controls keep that connection visible from both directions:

• Related SOPs is a read-only panel that appears inside a vendor's, team member's, equipment unit's, or carrier/TPA client's own detail card. It shows which of your documented SOPs already reference that specific entity, so you never have to go hunting through Processes to find out.
• The entity-link picker is the write side, a set of chip controls that live on the SOP's own detail card. It is how a link gets made or removed on purpose, tagging an SOP to the vendors, team members, and equipment it applies to so Related SOPs (and IQ) can find it later.

Both are part of Processes, a Premier feature. The panel and the picker are visible on every membership tier, but where Related SOPs sends you when you click through is gated, more on that below.

Where the Related SOPs panel shows up

The panel is not a page of its own; it lives inside four existing detail cards, and it only appears once Verinode has resolved at least one linked SOP:

• Vendors. Open Vendors from the sidebar, click a vendor tile, and a Related SOPs pill appears among that vendor's other tabs, badged with the number of SOPs found.
• Team. Open Team from the sidebar, click a team member's tile. The same Related SOPs pill appears, but only for an actual hired team member. An open role slot (a certification-gated or custom slot you have not filled) has nothing to link against, so the pill never shows for those rows.
• Equipment. Open Equipment from the sidebar, click a unit's tile. The same Related SOPs pill appears on the equipment detail card.
• Clients. Open Clients from the sidebar, click a Carrier or TPA client tile, and select the Processes tab. Related SOPs is folded into the bottom of that tab, underneath the processes you run with that client. Retail and Commercial clients do not carry a carrier/TPA SOP link, so this block never appears on those cards.

What each row in the panel shows

Above the row list, a small uppercase line reads the count: "1 SOP on file" or "N SOPs on file." Below it, every linked SOP is one row inside a single bordered, hairline-divided list, with:

• Title, the SOP's name, bold, truncated if it runs long.
• Category, one of Water, Fire, Mold, Reconstruction, Contents, or General, the same categories used everywhere in Processes.
• Status, shown only when the SOP is not Active. One still in progress reads Draft; one waiting on your confirmation after a lean-analysis or adherence flag reads Needs Review. Archived SOPs never appear in this panel, only Draft, Needs Review, and Active SOPs are eligible.
• Source tag, shown only for the two detected link kinds (Detected from a document or Detected from job execution). A link you set yourself, or a carrier/TPA link, carries no source tag, since you already know how it got there.
• An Open button on the right of every row.

The list is capped at 10 SOPs per entity. When more than 10 SOPs reference the same vendor, team member, or equipment unit, Verinode shows the 10 most recently linked; for a carrier or TPA, it shows active SOPs first, then the most recently updated.

If nothing links to the entity yet, the panel reads: "No SOPs touch this vendor yet. Verinode links them automatically when a process is documented from a job, an upload, or the SOP editor." (The wording swaps "this vendor" for "this team member," "this piece of equipment," or "this carrier" / "this TPA" to match the card you are on.)

How a link gets made

Verinode resolves the connection between an SOP and an entity one of three ways, and tags the row with which one it was:

1. 1Manual. You told Verinode directly, using the entity-link picker on the SOP's own detail card (see below). These rows carry no source tag, since you set it yourself.
2. 2Detected from a document. Verinode noticed the vendor, team member, or equipment name while reading whatever produced or updated the SOP, a job file, an upload, a photo caption. Tagged Detected from a document.
3. 3Detected from job execution. Process mining traced how jobs actually ran and found this vendor, team member, or equipment unit consistently associated with the step the SOP documents, even though nobody linked them on purpose. Tagged Detected from job execution.

Carrier and TPA links are always set the manual way, through a single "Link to Carrier or TPA" dropdown on the SOP itself. There is no automatic document or job-execution detection for that link today. Vendor, team, and equipment links can arrive any of the three ways above.

Opening a linked SOP

Click Open on any row and Verinode closes the detail card you are viewing, whichever entity's card it was, and takes you toward Processes. Today that lands you on the Processes home view rather than jumping straight into that one SOP's own card, so use the All Processes tab, or its search box, to pull the same SOP back up by title. See the All Processes tab for how that list works, and the SOP detail card for what you will find once you open it.

The entity-link picker: tagging an SOP to vendors, team, and equipment

The controls that create or remove a manual link live on the SOP's own detail card, under a section titled Link to Vendors, Team, or Equipment, with the note: "Anything you tag here helps IQ reach for this SOP when the operator asks about the vendor / team member / piece of equipment elsewhere in the platform." Three identical chip pickers sit stacked underneath it, one each for Vendors, Team, and Equipment.

1. 1Open Processes from the sidebar, then the All Processes tab, and click the SOP you want to tag.
2. 2Scroll to Link to Vendors, Team, or Equipment. Under each of the three sub-lists is a dropdown reading "Add a vendor…", "Add a team member…", or "Add a piece of equipment…".
3. 3Pick an option from the dropdown and it appears immediately as a removable chip, no separate save step. The dropdown resets to its placeholder so you can pick the next one the same way.
4. 4To remove a link, click the × on its chip. This saves right away too.

Each add or remove fires immediately: the chip appears or disappears the instant you act (optimistic UI), then the change saves in the background. If the save fails, the chip change rolls back and an inline error explains what went wrong, so you know it did not stick. The same error also surfaces as a toast on the SOP card.

What the picker shows when there is nothing to show:

• No chips yet. "No vendors linked yet." (or "team members," "pieces of equipment").
• Every option already linked. "All available vendors are already linked." (same pattern for team and equipment).
• No candidates exist at all. "No vendors on file yet. Add one in the Vendors section first." (same pattern, pointing to Team or Equipment).
• While a save is in flight. "Saving…"

The dropdown itself is a plain list, not a type-ahead search: it lists every vendor, team member, or equipment unit you have not already linked, and picking one adds it. Vendor, team, and equipment rosters at most operators are short enough that the whole list loads up front, no server round trip needed just to browse it.

Why the tagging exists

Restoration operators run the same vendor, the same lead tech, the same extraction unit across dozens of jobs without ever writing down "this is how we work together." That knowledge lives in habit, not in a document. Tagging an SOP to the people and equipment it actually involves closes that gap in both directions. If you are looking at a vendor's card wondering how your team is supposed to work with them, the answer might already be sitting in an SOP you wrote months ago, and Related SOPs is how you find it without leaving the vendor's page. Because Verinode also fills in detected links on its own, an SOP written from a job or an upload starts showing up on the right vendor, team member, or equipment card before anyone manually tags it. And because IQ reads these links too, it can reach for the right SOP when you ask it a question about that vendor, team member, or piece of equipment, instead of you having to remember which document to point it at.

Related reading

• The All Processes tab, for finding a linked SOP once Related SOPs sends you to Processes.
• The SOP detail card, for everything else on the SOP's own card, including the fields above and below the entity-link picker.
• Clients and carriers, for how a Carrier or TPA client's Processes tab is organized around the same linkage.

Data sources