"Trades: ranking your subs head to head"

Why setting a trade matters

A sub's trade is the one piece of setup that turns your roster from a list into a comparison. Until you tell Verinode that Rivera Drywall is a drywall sub, it can only look at them in isolation. Once the trade is set, two things unlock: Verinode can rank them head to head against your other subs in the same trade, so you can see who your strongest and weakest drywall option actually is, and it can search local alternatives in that trade if they ever underperform. The trade is also what sharpens a sub's standing line: with at least two rated subs sharing a trade, the sub's overview reads something like "#2 of 3 your drywall subs" instead of ranking them against your whole rated roster.

Verinode never guesses a trade from a company name. You set it, in a few taps, and everything downstream follows.

Where the trade picker lives

Open any sub from the Subcontractors page and the picker sits on the Overview tab of their card, in a row labeled Trades. If no trade is set yet, the row says exactly what it is for: "No trade set. Set a trade to rank this sub against your others in the same trade, and to source local alternatives if they underperform." Tap + Set trade (or Edit once trades exist) and the full trade list appears as tappable chips: Drywall, Plumbing, Electrical, HVAC, Roofing, Flooring, Painting, Mold Remediation, Emergency Board-Up & Securing, Demolition & Debris, and the rest of the restoration trade catalog, 22 trades in all. Tap to add, tap again to remove, and hit Done. A sub can carry more than one trade; a GC-style outfit that does both carpentry and drywall ranks in both.

How the ranking works

The head-to-head view lives in the analysis deck: on the Subcontractors page, open Analyze your subs in the Apps row and swipe to the Trade rankings tab. Each trade with at least one sub gets its own group, and inside it your subs appear as a numbered, ranked list.

The order is deliberate. Subs with logged performance rank by their reliability score, highest first, shown as a value like "82/100" with their standing (Reliable, Watch, or At risk) beneath the bar. Subs you have never rated fall to the bottom, marked "not rated yet" with a dash instead of a score; among themselves they order by how much you have spent on them. An unrated sub is never ranked above a rated one, however big their invoices, because a spend figure is not a performance read.

Up to six trades show at once, with a note like "and 3 more trades" when your book runs wider. Trades where the ranking found a sub worth replacing sort to the front, so the trade that needs a decision is the first one you see; after those, the most contested trades (the ones with the most subs) come first.

When the laggard is actually flagged

Being last in a trade is not, by itself, a problem. The lowest-ranked rated sub in a trade is flagged as a drop candidate, drawn in red and marked "weakest", only when the analysis verdict genuinely says so: either their verdict is Review or replace (reliability at risk, or an expired COI on more than $5,000 of billed work), or their verdict is Watch and there are real backcharges on record. A sub who is merely third of three, with clean work and no backcharges, is never painted as a problem for finishing last.

When a trade does have a flagged sub, the group closes with the way out. If a stronger rated sub in the same trade is already on your roster, the note names them: "You have a stronger Drywall sub: {name}. Shift work their way, or open the weak sub to source a local alternative." If nobody stronger shares the trade, it says so and points you at the local search instead. That search, and the outreach draft that goes with it, is covered in replacing a sub and reaching out.

The honest empty state

If no sub on your roster has a trade set yet, the Trade rankings tab does not pretend. It reads: "No trades set on your subs yet. Open a sub, set its trade, and Verinode ranks your subs head-to-head in each trade so you can see who your strongest and weakest are." That is the whole gate, and it is yours to open: open a sub, tap + Set trade on the Overview tab, pick the trade, and the ranking builds itself from there.

Data sources