"Rules: the dials for what IQ watches for"

What this page is

Rules is where you tell your Chief Data Officer what to watch for on your own book: a state a job should never sit in ("Sold with no estimate value," "Invoiced and not collected"), or a clock between two milestones that shouldn't run too long ("Inspected more than three days ago and no estimate sent"). Think of it as an equalizer, not a to-do list: every band on the board is a dial you can leave alone, nudge, or turn off, and the consequences of a tripped rule live elsewhere, never on this page itself.

A rule has exactly one consequence: IQ tells you, with the dollars behind it, through the surfaces that already carry consequences, a signal on your Feed, the money behind it on Cash, the job on Jobs' Job Health. A rule never moves a job's stage, contacts a customer, or assigns anyone. If you're looking for a page that lists what's currently tripping, that's the Feed, Cash, or Jobs, not this page: Rules only holds the dials and their current position.

Where to find it

Open Settings from the sidebar, then in the Your business group click Rules, or go directly to /settings/rules. You can also open Rules already scoped to one section from the Rules tile in that section's Explore row (on Jobs it opens scoped to lifecycle and stage rules, on Cash to collection rules, and so on); the direct link is /settings/rules?section=cash (or jobs, sales, and so on).

How a dial works

Every band on the board has one of three positions:

• Flat, the observed standard: the network's own median for that band, mined from every operator's process and labeled as such. Nobody types this number; it's never yours alone to set.
• Moved, your own number in place of the flat position.
• Muted, off entirely. This is a real, recorded state, not a deletion: an operator who sells no retail can silence "sold with no estimate" without losing the rule if their business changes later.

A band whose columns your book hasn't filled in yet renders grayed out with the artifact that would fill it, it's never simply hidden. Nothing you can't currently see is nonetheless watching you; a band with nothing behind it says so.

Move a dial and it applies to your next import immediately; there's no separate Activate step. Every change is recorded automatically as a version, so grading history always knows which position a job was graded against, you never have to remember to save one.

Presets

A consultant's process standard or your franchise network's bar can move several bands at once as a labeled preset. Any dial you've moved yourself sits on top of a preset and survives it being changed or replaced, your own answer is always the first one Verinode reads for that band.

Adding your own rule

Beyond the built-in bands, you can add a custom rule from a small set of building blocks over the columns your own book actually carries: a field being present or absent, days since another field passed some number, one amount compared against another, optionally scoped to your own stage names. You can't invent a field that doesn't exist in your data, if a rule needs a column your export never fills, it's refused with the same explanation a built-in band gives when it's waiting on data.

Best-practice example

Say collections are running long on a specific carrier's jobs. On Rules, scoped to Cash, you'd find the collection clock band, currently flat at the network median, and move it to a tighter number that matches how fast you actually expect to get paid. From then on, any job that blows past your own threshold shows up as a signal on your Feed and as money at risk on Cash, without you having to remember to check for it. If a line of business doesn't apply to you (say, a rule about sold-but-unestimated retail jobs when you do no retail), you'd mute that band instead of leaving it to trip on jobs that were never really exceptions for your business.

Data sources