The Vendor Hero and Take Action Row

What this page covers

Every vendor you use, the software, the equipment rental houses, the material suppliers, the subcontractors, sits in one place: Vendors, in the sidebar, at /vendors. The page opens with two things stacked at the top: a hero panel that gives you the four numbers that matter about your whole vendor stack at a glance, and a Take Action row of horizontally scrolling tiles that puts your next move directly in front of you. This article walks through both, number by number, tile by tile, including the four different things Take Action shows you depending on how much vendor data Verinode has to work with.

Nothing here is generic advice. Every figure on this page is read from the vendor relationships you have flowing in, invoices you have forwarded, contracts you have uploaded, screenshots you have pasted. Verinode does not create vendor relationships or invent spend. It reads what is already in your inbox and your files and turns it into a number you can act on.

Where to find it

Open Vendors from the sidebar. The route is /vendors. The hero panel is the first thing on the page, no scrolling required. Directly below it is Take Action, the first horizontal row of tiles.

The hero panel

The hero panel is a flat band, no card frame, that answers four questions before you scroll an inch: how many vendors are you actively working with, how are they scoring on average, what are you spending a month, and how many need attention right now.

The headline number: vendor count. The large number on the left is your active vendor count, an animated count-up when the page loads. This counts only relationships marked active in your stack, so a vendor you have retired or replaced does not inflate the number. The eyebrow above it reads "Vendor Stack."

Empty state. If you have not connected any vendors yet, the count starts at zero and the line underneath reads: "Add Data, your vendor stack appears here as soon as a contract, invoice, or screenshot lands." That is a direct instruction, not a placeholder: use the Add Data button in the page header (top right) to forward an invoice, upload a contract, or paste a screenshot, and this number moves.

The score pill. Next to the count, when you have at least one scored vendor, a pill reads something like "7.8 Avg Score." This is your average Verinode Score across every actively scored vendor in your stack, on a 0 to 10 scale that blends how a vendor performs against what you actually pay them and how they compare to peers doing the same work. The pill's color tracks the number: it reads as strong when your average clears the top band, steady in the middle band, and flagged when it falls into the lowest band. If no vendor in your stack has a score yet, the pill does not render at all, there is no vendor count in that case, so there is nothing to build an average from.

The subtext line. Directly under the count and pill, one sentence adapts to what is actually going on in your stack:

• With no vendors: the Add Data prompt above.
• With at least one vendor scoring below your benchmark: "N vendors scoring below your benchmark, review or replace." (singular "vendor" when N is 1).
• Otherwise: "N categories covered across your stack.", a plain count of the distinct vendor categories (software, equipment rental, materials, and so on) you have coverage in.

Monthly Spend. The first of two secondary figures, on the right. This totals the current monthly amount across every active vendor relationship, in dollars, formatted the same way everywhere on the platform ($5.0k, $2.2M) so it reads consistently with Margin and every other section. The sub-line under it reads "Across Active Vendors." If your active vendors carry no billed amount at all, this renders as a clean dash instead of a fake $0.

At Risk. The second secondary figure counts vendors whose individual Verinode Score has dropped below Verinode's low-score line, the vendors most worth a second look. This is a different check from the pill's tone (which reads your stack-wide average), At Risk looks at each vendor on its own, so a strong average can still sit next to one or two flagged vendors. When the count is above zero, the number renders in Ember Red (the Analyze signal color) and the sub-line reads "Below Score Threshold." When every vendor is clear, the number is neutral-toned and the sub-line flips to "All Vendors Performing." At Risk is read directly off each vendor's own score, so it moves the moment a vendor's terms, price, or delivery pattern changes.

Take Action: your vendor decisions row

Take Action is the row directly under the hero. It is a horizontally scrolling stack of tiles, each one either something to click into (a decision, a way to add a vendor, a way to talk to your agent) or an honest statement about what stage your vendor data is at. The row builds itself from up to four kinds of tiles, in this order:

1. Find a Vendor (always present)
2. Talk to IQ (present until you have engaged the agent for this section)
3. Make Your Vendor Stack Work / Deepen Your Vendor Stack (present until your data sources are fully in)
4. Decision tiles or an empty-state card (the section's actual findings, or one of four honest empty states)

Find a Vendor

This tile is always the first thing in the row. It opens a guided vendor-selection flow: the headline reads "Find a Vendor," the sub-line reads "IQ shortlists the right fit from your data, process signals, and the network," and the button reads "Start." Click it and IQ walks you through picking a category and surfaces vendor options shortlisted against your own job data and process signals, plus what the network knows about vendors doing that kind of work. This is a genuine manual action you take, not something Verinode automates behind your back, you decide which vendor to bring on.

Talk to IQ

The second tile, present until you have had a real conversation with the agent about vendors, opens the right-side agent panel with a message already seeded: "I'm IQ. I watch your vendor stack, what you pay, what you get, contracts auto-renewing on you, alternatives that score better than what you have today. Right now I'm cold." It asks you directly which vendor is the most painful or expensive right now and what the friction is, and it tells you the fastest way in is to forward a recent vendor invoice or upload your AP export. The tile retires itself, permanently, the first time you engage: it checks in the background whether you already have a conversation anchored to Vendors, and once you do, this tile does not come back.

Make Your Vendor Stack Work / Deepen Your Vendor Stack

The third tile tracks how many of the data sources this section needs are actually flowing in. It has two states and disappears entirely once every source is in.

• Cold ("Make Your Vendor Stack Work"): none of your vendor data sources have landed. Headline: "Upload Your Data To Switch It On," with the promise line "Spend, price drift, and renewal timing across every vendor you use." On the web app, this cold state is normally superseded by the richer Decisions-row empty state below (which lists concrete upload steps), so in practice you will usually see the Decisions card, not this tile, when you have zero vendors.
• Partial ("Deepen Your Vendor Stack"): some sources are in, some are not. Headline reads "N Of M Sources In. Add The Rest." A checklist below shows each input, Vendor Invoices (unlocks spend tracking and price benchmarking, sourced from forwarded invoices) and Contracts & Renewals among them, each marked with a green check and "· in" when present, or an open circle with the source tool named when it is still missing. The button reads "Add What's Missing" and opens the same Add Data capture flow.

Once every input this section needs is present, the tile renders nothing, one less thing competing for your attention.

Decision tiles: your actual vendor findings

This is where the vendor-specific work lives. Each decision tile is built from a real signal Verinode found in your data, contract price drift against peers, a renewal date closing in, a vendor whose delivery pattern has shifted. A tile shows:

• A Recommended eyebrow (in copper), the posture every tile in this row carries, everything surfaced here is something worth acting on.
• A headline dollar figure when the decision has a quantified impact (monthly or annualized), for example a monthly overspend, with a subject line underneath naming what the number is about (which vendor, which cost pattern). When there is no dollar figure, the headline is a plain description of the metric instead (never a raw database key, always a readable label).
• A small entity panel on the right: the vendor's logo, its name, and a row of lifecycle dots (Flagged, Planned, Acting, Resolved) showing exactly how far along this decision is.
• A trajectory arrow and label (Improving, Stable, Declining) when Verinode has enough history to say which way the underlying metric is moving.

Click a tile and it opens the full decision detail as a glass overlay on top of whatever you were doing, with the reasoning behind the recommendation, the concrete next step, and buttons to act, snooze, or dig into why. The first tile in the row renders slightly larger (the "hero" variant) than the ones after it. Only decisions still open (pending or recently snoozed) show up here; once you act on one and it resolves, it moves to your full decision history rather than crowding this row. For how decisions work end to end once you click in, see The Decision Workspace.

The four honest empty states

If there are no open decisions to show, the row does not fake one. It shows exactly one of four states, and which one you see tells you something real about where your vendor data stands:

1. 1No vendors at all: "Build your vendor stack." "Three quick moves and your first vendor decisions surface within minutes." Below the message, three concrete steps, each clickable:
2. 2- Upload a recent vendor invoice ("Software, supplies, equipment rental, any one will do.")
3. 3- Forward a renewal or contract email ("Set up auto-forward in Gmail / Outlook so renewals land here automatically."), links to Connect.
4. 4- Paste a subscription receipt or quote ("Screenshots and PDFs both work.")
5. 5A footer line reads "Decisions surface as contracts approach renewal or cost patterns shift," followed by the data-trust line: "Encrypted under a key scoped to you. Never sold to carriers, and no Verinode employee can browse or export it."
6. 6Vendors exist, but nothing has surfaced yet: "Still learning your stack." "As your agent analyzes vendors, scores, and contract terms, top decisions will appear here." This is the honest middle ground: you have real vendors in the system, but Verinode has not yet found a pattern worth surfacing, no price drift confirmed, no renewal close enough to flag, no delivery issue detected. This is not a stall, it is Verinode declining to manufacture a decision that isn't there yet.
7. 7Vendors exist and every past signal has been worked through: "Your vendor stack is clean." "You've worked through N signals. New ones will surface as contracts approach renewal or cost patterns shift." (singular "signal" when N is 1). This is the state you want to see steadily: it means your open decisions dropped to zero because you handled them, not because none were ever found.
8. 8Open decisions exist. The row shows the actual decision tiles described above instead of any empty-state card.

How the pieces relate

The hero panel is a snapshot; Take Action is where you do something about it. If the hero's At Risk figure is above zero, the vendor behind that number is very likely one of the decision tiles sitting in Take Action, click through to see exactly which vendor, why it scored low, and what to do about it. If Monthly Spend looks high relative to what you remember paying, a decision tile flagging price drift against peers is usually the explanation, not a coincidence. The two rows are reading the same underlying data from two different angles: total and pattern.

Best-practice example

Say the hero panel shows 14 active vendors, an average score pill reading "6.9 Avg Score" in the middle tone, $8.4k Monthly Spend, and 2 At Risk in Ember Red. Scroll to Take Action: the first two decision tiles both concern equipment rental vendors, one flags a contract renewing inside 90 days at a rate that has drifted above what peers pay for the same equipment class, the other flags a vendor whose delivery reliability has been declining for two consecutive months. Click the renewal tile first, since a renewal date is a hard deadline the price drift will only get worse if you let it auto-renew. Use the plan inside the decision detail to draft your renegotiation ask before the window closes, then come back to the reliability tile with more runway to work it.

Data sources

Related articles

• Understanding Your Margin
• Benchmarks Overview
• Reading a Benchmark
• The Decision Workspace
• Clients and Carriers
• Forwarding Documents
• Connecting Your Data
• How Benchmarks Work