Signal count badges on entity cards

What it is

Wherever Verinode lists individual records, vendors, jobs, clients, or carriers, a record with something open on it can carry a small pill next to its name: a colored dot and a count, for example "3 signals." That is the signal count badge. It is a passive indicator, not a button; it does not open anything on its own. It exists so you can scan a list of forty vendors or two hundred jobs and see at a glance which ones have something waiting on them, without opening each one.

A signal, in Verinode's vocabulary, is something IQ detected on its own: a carrier slower to pay than usual, a vendor's invoice pattern drifting from your history, a job stalled past its normal cycle time, a certification approaching expiry. Signals are what feed the Feed and the decision workspace; the badge is the card-level echo of that same underlying data, so you never have to open a record to find out whether it is quiet or not.

Where you'll find it

The badge sits on the entity card wherever Verinode renders one, list rows and tiles in Vendors, Jobs, Clients, and Carriers. It appears only on a record that currently has at least one open signal attached to it; a quiet record's card carries no badge at all, nothing is added or removed visually to say "zero."

Open the record itself and, further down the detail page, a Signals section lists the same signals in full, one row per signal, with the severity dot, the title, a status word, and the dollar impact when one is attached. That section header reads Signals (N), where N is the same total the card badge showed you. If the record has more open signals than fit in the initial view, a View all N signals → link at the bottom leads into the full signal list where you can dismiss, action, or capture an outcome on each one; see acting on decisions for what happens after that.

How the count is derived

The number in the badge is not every signal Verinode has ever raised on that record. It is a live, filtered count:

1. 1Verinode pulls every signal on your book whose entity_id points at that specific vendor, job, client, or carrier.
2. 2Any signal you have dismissed is dropped from the count. Dismissing is the one action that removes a signal from consideration entirely.
3. 3Any signal with an expiry date that has already passed is dropped. Some signals are time-boxed (a weather alert, a seasonal pattern) and stop counting once their window closes; signals with no expiry date never age out this way.
4. 4Everything left, newly detected signals, ones you have seen, ones you have already marked actioned, ones marked resolved, and ones you have parked, is counted toward the total on the badge.
5. 5The badge's dot color is set by the single highest severity present in what is left: Critical beats Warning, which beats Info. A record with one critical signal and four informational ones still shows the critical color, because that is the one that needs your attention first.

This is a live recalculation each time the page loads, not a stored counter. Action a signal, dismiss it, or let it expire, and the badge on that record's card reflects it the next time you load the list.

What the color means

The badge's dot and its tinted border/background both follow the same three-tier severity scale Verinode uses everywhere signals appear:

| Severity | Color | Rough meaning | |---|---|---| | Critical | Ember red | Needs attention now: a real dollar exposure or a pattern that is actively getting worse. | | Warning | Hard hat yellow | Worth a look soon: drifting off your own norm but not yet urgent. | | Info | IQ teal | Worth knowing: a lower-stakes pattern or a heads-up with no immediate cost. |

These are the same three colors used on the row inside the record's own Signals section, so a critical badge on the card and the critical dot on the matching row inside are the same signal, read the same way, in two places.

Inside the Signals section, each row also carries a small status word next to its title, lowercase: new (in copper), seen (muted), or actioned (in the Expand green), depending on what you have done with it. Resolved and parked signals still count toward the total but don't carry their own distinct color here; they read the same muted tone as seen.

Dollar impact on the signal row

When a signal inside the Signals section carries an estimated dollar figure, it shows under the title as an approximate amount, for example "~$2,400," followed by a small unit label: per month, per week, per job, per year, or one-time, depending on how that signal was scoped. Where the signal is also tagged with what kind of margin lever it touches, a small uppercase tag sits beside the dollar figure: cost, time, revenue, or risk. Not every signal carries a dollar estimate; several are pattern flags with no dollar figure attached, and those rows show only the title, severity dot, and status.

Empty states

• No open signals on a record. The card shows no badge at all. This is the default, most quiet state; it means nothing on that record has crossed a detection threshold, not that Verinode hasn't looked.
• No open signals on the record's own Signals section. The section reads "No signals detected for this entity."
• While signals are loading. The Signals section briefly shows two pulsing placeholder bars before the real content (or the empty-state line) replaces them.

Related reading

• The decision workspace
• The Feed
• Acting on decisions
• Clients and carriers