Reading signal severity and confidence
Every decision Verinode surfaces, on a job, a client, a carrier, a vendor, or your business as a whole, carries two independent readouts: a **severity** (how urgent it is) and, where the underlying…
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What this covers
Every decision Verinode surfaces, on a job, a client, a carrier, a vendor, or your business as a whole, carries two independent readouts: a severity (how urgent it is) and, where the underlying detector can assess it, a confidence (how solid the evidence behind it is). They are not the same thing. A signal can be Critical and High confidence (a carrier balance that has aged past 90 days, confirmed by your own AR data), or Critical and Low confidence (a pattern that looks urgent but is built on a thin sample). Reading both together, not just the color, is how you decide what to act on first.
Verinode does not decide for you. It reads the jobs, clients, carriers, and documents already flowing in from your systems, ranks what it finds by how urgent and how well-supported it is, and lays that out so you can act. You make the call.
Where to find it
Signal severity and confidence show up on decision cards in the Feed, at iq.verinode.ai/feed. Each card that represents a detected pattern, whether it is framed with a dollar figure or a plain-language consequence, opens with the same two-part header: a colored dot and severity label, followed by a confidence pill when one is available.
Use the filter bar at the top of the Feed to narrow to just this kind of card: All, Decisions, Content, Events. Choosing Decisions shows only cards built from detected signals, which is where severity and confidence live. A second control lets you bound the time window: Today, This week, 30 days, or All time.
Opening a card's Act button carries the same severity into the decision workspace, where you work the recommendation. See the decision workspace for what happens after you act, and the Feed for how the feed itself is organized and refreshed.
Note
Some longtime users still call this stream "Signals" or "Pipeline," from earlier versions of the platform. Both names now lead into the same place: the Feed and the decision workspace behind it. The underlying logic (severity, confidence, ranking) has not changed, only where you read it.
The three severities
Every signal carries exactly one severity: critical, warning, or info. Verinode never invents a fourth level, and it never downgrades a severity to make a week look calmer than it is.
Each severity maps to one of Verinode's brand signal colors, the same palette used everywhere in the product, never a generic red or amber:
| Severity | Color | Signal name | What it means | |---|---|---|---| | Critical | Ember Red | Analyse | Something needs a decision now. Left alone, it is actively costing you or exposing you to risk. | | Warning | Hard Hat Yellow | Maintain | Worth handling soon. Not on fire, but drifting in the wrong direction. | | Info | IQ Teal | Monitor | Worth knowing. Nothing to act on immediately, just context Verinode is tracking. |
On a card, this shows as a small colored dot next to the severity word (Critical, Warning, Info), spelled out, never the raw lowercase database value. When a signal has no dollar figure attached (common for insurance, certification, and compliance risk, where the cost of inaction is not a clean number), the severity also drives a plain-language urgency line instead of a price tag:
- Critical reads as Urgent
- Warning reads as Act soon
- Info reads as When you can
That urgency word is paired with a risk-kind label drawn from the domain the signal lives in: Compliance risk (safety, certifications, insurance, general compliance), Cash flow risk (billing), Revenue risk (jobs, clients), or Business risk as the fallback for anything else. So a certification gap might read "Compliance risk · Urgent," while a slow-drifting job-type margin might read "Revenue risk · Act soon."
Why criticals are always ranked first
Signal severity is stored as a plain database value ("critical," "warning," "info"), and those three words sort alphabetically as critical, then info, then warning, which is exactly backwards from what matters operationally. Verinode never lets that alphabetical accident decide what you see first. Every list of signals, on a card feed, inside a decision workspace, anywhere severity drives order, is ranked in memory by actual urgency: critical outranks warning, and warning outranks info, full stop.
Within the same severity, ties are broken by recency: the signal Verinode most recently confirmed (its last seen timestamp) sorts above an older one at the same severity. So the ordering you see is always: every critical, most recently confirmed first, then every warning, most recently confirmed first, then info.
This means the top of your Feed is never an accident of alphabetical sorting or of what happened to get written to the database last. It is always the most urgent thing Verinode currently knows about you, and within that, the freshest read on it.
Reading confidence
Confidence answers a different question than severity: not "how urgent," but "how sure is Verinode of this." It shows up as a small pill directly beside the severity dot on a decision card, and it takes one of three values:
- High, colored with the Deere Green tint used for confirmed wins elsewhere in the product. The pattern is well-supported by your data, a peer benchmark, or a documented rule, and the recommendation follows directly from it.
- Medium, colored with the same Hard Hat Yellow tint used for the Maintain severity. The pattern is real but built on a thinner base, a smaller sample, an estimate, or a partial read of your data.
- Low, shown as a plain neutral gray pill with no color at all. The signal is directionally worth knowing but should be treated as a lead to investigate, not a settled fact.
That neutral gray for Low is deliberate. Confidence never borrows the Ember Red used for Critical severity, so a low-confidence signal never visually competes with a genuinely urgent one for your attention. The color that should pull your eye first is always the severity dot; confidence is the finer-grained read once you are already looking at the card.
Not every card carries a confidence pill. Detectors that have not assessed evidence strength for a given signal simply omit it, you will see the severity dot and label with no pill beside it. A missing confidence pill is not a lower confidence, it means that particular detector does not produce a confidence rating for this kind of pattern yet.
Heads up
Confidence describes how well-supported the pattern is, not how big the dollar figure is. A High-confidence signal can carry a modest dollar value, and a Low-confidence one can carry a large one. Read the dollar and the confidence as two separate questions before deciding how much weight to give a card.
Putting it together on a card
A typical decision card in the Feed reads top to bottom like this:
- Severity dot + label (Critical / Warning / Info), plus the entity name it concerns, plus a confidence pill (High / Medium / Low) when one exists.
- The value line: either a dollar figure with its time unit (per year, per month, per job, or one-time), or, when no dollar applies, the risk-kind and urgency line (e.g., "Compliance risk · Urgent").
- The headline, a plain-English statement of what Verinode found.
- IQ recommends, the specific action Verinode suggests, when the detector has one.
- Occasionally, a Benchmark line showing how far your number sits from the peer median, in standard deviations.
Note
That Benchmark line uses its own color scale based on distance from the median (how many standard deviations out you sit), not the card's severity color. A card can show a Critical severity dot at the top and a Benchmark line further down colored differently, because they are answering two different questions: "how urgent is this" and "how far from typical is this number." Don't read the Benchmark line's color as a second severity, it isn't one.
What to do with severity and confidence together
Work the Feed roughly in this order: Critical first, then Warning, then Info, following the ranking Verinode already applied. Within Critical, weight High-confidence cards more heavily than Low-confidence ones when you are deciding what to tackle in the next hour versus what to keep an eye on. A Critical, Low-confidence card is worth a quick look to sanity-check it against what you already know, a Critical, High-confidence card is worth acting on directly. See acting on decisions for what "Act" actually does once you have picked a card.
Empty states
When there is nothing left to review, the Feed does not show a blank screen. It shows:
All caught up Verinode IQ is continuously analyzing your data and scanning industry sources. New decisions, insights, and updates will appear here as they surface. Check back soon. Your next briefing is building.
If you have a filter or time window selected that matches nothing (for example, Decisions narrowed to Today, and nothing new was detected today), the Feed shows a lighter empty state instead: "No items match this filter." Widen the time window or switch back to All to see the full set.
Neither empty state means severity or confidence are broken, it means Verinode has not yet detected a pattern worth surfacing in that window. As more jobs, clients, carrier activity, and documents flow in, signals appear on their own; you never need to create or track them manually.
Related reading
Data sources
- 1.Your jobs, clients, carriers, vendors, and documents. Your business.
- 2.Peer benchmark medians used in the Benchmark comparison line. Verinode intelligence layer (anonymized, never sold to carriers).