The Findings Tab: Vendor Decisions

What the Findings tab is

Vendors has its own card slider, the overlay that opens when you click into the section from /vendors, and Findings is the first of its five tabs: Findings, Stack, Coverage, Spend, Renewals. Where Stack lists every vendor you actively use and Coverage maps your stack against your business archetype, Findings is the tab that holds Verinode's actual work product for this section: the vendor decisions your agent has surfaced from your contracts, invoices, and renewal data, laid out as a tile grid you can scan and click into one at a time.

Nothing on this tab is generic advice. Every tile traces back to a real pattern read from your own vendor relationships, contract terms, spend, or renewal dates, plus (where the pattern supports it) how peers running similar vendor categories compare. Verinode surfaces the pattern and lays out the recommendation. You decide whether to act, park it, or ignore it.

Where to find it

Open Vendors from the sidebar (/vendors), then click into any vendor tile, the Vendor Stack hero, or any metric in Explore to open the card slider. The slider's tab strip runs Findings · Stack · Coverage · Spend · Renewals, in that fixed order, and Findings is selected by default. The Findings tab loads its decisions in the background as soon as the slider opens, so the other tabs (Stack, Coverage, and so on) never wait on it.

The grid

At the top of the tab, a small uppercase label counts how many decisions are waiting: "N decisions to review" ("1 decision to review" when there is exactly one). Below it, the tiles lay out in a responsive grid, one column on narrow screens, up to three across on wide ones.

Empty state. If Verinode has nothing to surface for this section yet, the tab reads exactly: "No decisions for vendors right now. As your agent finds patterns, they'll appear here." This is not a broken screen. It means no vendor pattern (contract price drift, a renewal closing in, a delivery issue) has cleared the bar to surface yet, not that Verinode has stopped looking.

Reading a tile

Each tile is built the same way every Findings gallery on the platform is built (jobs, equipment, and every other section share this exact tile), so once you know how to read one here, you know how to read them everywhere:

• The dollar figure, when there is one. A large bold number at the top of the tile, formatted the same way it is across the platform ($450, $12k, $1.4M), with a small period label beside it ("/mo" for a monthly figure, "/yr" for an annualized one, or "one-time" for a pool that shouldn't be read as recurring). This is the impact Verinode is putting a number on, a contract overpaying against peers, a renewal risk, a spend pattern.
• The title underneath. A short, readable line naming the vendor and what's going on with it, for example a vendor whose cost is drifting from what peers pay, or a vendor whose pattern is bending in one direction or another. This is never a raw database value, it's always written as a sentence.
• No dollar figure yet. Some findings (a compliance-shaped vendor risk, for instance) can't be cleanly priced. On those tiles, a small risk-kind and urgency chip (for example "Compliance risk · Act soon") sits above a bolded one-line consequence statement instead of a dollar figure, with the full title underneath in smaller type.
• The status pill, top right. A small colored dot plus label. On the Vendors Findings tab this reads Pending, in Hard Hat Yellow, since a freshly surfaced decision hasn't been acted on yet.
• The action row at the bottom. Three buttons: Act, Not now, Ignore. On this tab the row renders visibly but grayed out, it's not wired for one-tap action directly from the tile grid here. Clicking anywhere on the tile itself (not one of the three buttons) is what opens the decision.
• The "Acted" or "Done" stamp. If a decision you've already acted on or resolved is still showing here, the tile tints green and carries a rotated rubber-stamp watermark reading ACTED or DONE. Clicking that tile skips the drill-in entirely and takes you straight to the decision's full workspace at /decisions/[id], since there's nothing left to review on this tab, the action plan is where the work continues.

Clicking into a decision

Click any tile (other than an already-stamped one) and the slider drills one level deeper: instead of the grid, you're looking at a single decision, full detail, filling the same overlay. A breadcrumb at the top, "← All decisions," in copper, takes you back to the grid.

Navigating between decisions. Once you're drilled in, you don't need to back out to see the next one. Swipe left or right (trackpad or touch), use the Left/Right arrow keys, or click the floating side arrows the overlay provides, and the deck pages through your open vendor decisions one at a time. A small line at the bottom of each decision reminds you: "← / → or swipe to navigate decisions · Esc to go back." Press Esc at any point to close the drill-in and return to the grid.

What the decision detail shows

The drilled-in view is the full decision card, the same one used across the Feed and the /decisions workspace, rendered flat here (no extra card frame, since the overlay already provides the surface).

Header row. A small dot colored to the decision's trajectory (pulsing red for declining, green for improving, yellow for stable), a status word (Declining, Needs context, or plain Decision), the vendor's name, and, on the far right, a confidence pill (high / medium / low), colored green, yellow, or gray.

The impact number. When Verinode has a dollar figure, it's the largest thing on the card: the annualized or monthly amount at stake, with a plain-language suffix ("/yr at stake," "/mo at stake," or "one-time at stake"). Directly under it, a small tag reads Calculated (green, when the figure is derived directly from your own data) or Estimated (yellow, when it's a working assumption). When Verinode knows more about where the estimate came from, a second tag chains on: "· Peer cohort" (built from how similar vendor relationships perform) or "· Industry baseline" (built from published restoration benchmarks rather than a live peer comparison). Beside the tag, a short sentence spells out the calculation in plain language when one is available.

No dollar figure. For findings that can't be priced cleanly, this slot instead shows a risk-kind and urgency chip (the same pairing as the tile) above a bolded one-line consequence statement.

The title. The same headline sentence you saw on the tile, now given its own line.

Lifecycle dots. A four-stage tracker, Flagged → Planned → Acting → Resolved, the same pattern jobs use for Assigned/Started/Billed/Paid. On a fresh decision this sits at Flagged, so you can tell at a glance the decision hasn't been committed to yet.

The recommendation, or the honest gap. One of two tiles, never both:

• Recommended action (copper border): the concrete next step Verinode is proposing, plus a line reading "If you don't: [consequence]" and, when confidence isn't high, a "Refine this estimate" note naming what data would sharpen the number, exactly what forwarding the missing document or answering the agent's follow-up would fix.
• Needs your context (dashed border): when there isn't enough to recommend a specific action yet, this tile states the pattern plainly and tells you that clicking Act hands you to the agent, who will ask a couple of quick questions to shape a real recommendation instead of making you fill out a form.

What peers did. Below the recommendation, a short block (hidden entirely when Verinode doesn't have cohort coverage for this particular signal yet, no placeholder, no "insufficient data" message) reads how many operators facing a comparable vendor pattern in the last 90 days acted on it, and, of those, how many saw the underlying metric improve afterward. This is read qualitatively, as a share, never as a specific peer headcount, and it's the moat made visible: proof that acting on this kind of signal has actually worked for others in your position, not a guess.

The buttons. Act (primary, copper) hands the decision to your agent and takes you to its full workspace at /decisions/[id], where the plan gets built. Not now opens a short reason picker, Too busy, Need more info, Not convinced, or Other, and parks the decision (a confirmation reads "Parked, this will resurface later"). Why?, shown only when Verinode has proof to show, expands a drawer underneath with the specific numbers behind the finding (your own value, the peer average, and the research standard, when each exists) and, when known, the root cause chain that led to this decision.

What happens after you act

Clicking Act doesn't do the work invisibly. It materializes the underlying decision as a real, trackable item and routes you to /decisions/[id], the same workspace every decision across the platform shares, where your agent drafts a concrete plan you can review, edit, and check off step by step. See The decision workspace for how that full lifecycle works, from a fresh Act click through to a resolved outcome.

How Findings relates to the rest of Vendors

Findings is where Vendors' work product lives; the other four tabs are where the underlying data lives. A decision flagging a contract renewing at a rate above what peers pay traces back to a real row in Renewals. A decision about a vendor whose cost has drifted traces back to Spend. A decision about a gap in your archetype traces back to Coverage. Findings is the tab that turns all of that raw stack data into something you can act on, one decision at a time, instead of leaving you to spot the pattern yourself across four separate tabs.

Best-practice example

Say the Findings tab reads "3 decisions to review." The first tile carries a dollar figure of roughly $4k a year and a title naming a specific vendor's cost drifting from peers. Click it. The drilled-in view shows an Estimated · Peer cohort tag on the number, meaning the figure comes from how similar vendor relationships in your cohort are priced, not a fixed target. The recommendation tile suggests renegotiating that vendor's rate before the next renewal, with a "What peers did" block showing that most operators who acted on a similar cost-drift finding saw the metric improve within a couple of months. Click Why? to see your own rate against the peer average before you commit, then Act to send it to your agent, who drafts the renegotiation plan in the Decisions workspace.

Data sources

Related articles

• The Vendors section: your vendor stack at a glance
• The vendor hero and Take Action row
• Explore tile: Coverage (Stack vs Archetype)
• The decision workspace
• How benchmarks work
• Reading a benchmark
• Understanding your margin