The Vendors Section: Your Vendor Stack at a Glance

What the Vendors section is

Vendors is where Verinode reads everything you pay outside contractors for: software subscriptions, equipment rental accounts, supply-house relationships, restoration-specific tools, insurance and bonding, and every other recurring vendor relationship your business runs on. It does not replace your accounting software or your vendor portals. It reads the invoices, contracts, and renewal emails you already have flowing through the platform and turns them into one place where you can see the whole stack: what you are paying, how each vendor is performing, what is renewing soon, and where you have gaps a similar restoration business usually fills.

Verinode surfaces the pattern and lays out the option. You decide whether to renegotiate, replace, or leave a vendor alone.

Where to find it

Open Vendors from the sidebar. The route is /vendors. If Vendors has not been switched on yet for your account, you land on a "Switch on Vendors" panel describing what the section surfaces, with a single button that turns it on, no separate setup flow.

The page is a single scrolling home built from five rows: Hero, Take Action, Explore, Local network, and Most recent. Clicking almost anything on the page (a tile in Take Action, a metric in Explore, a vendor in Most recent) opens an overlay card on top of the home with the full detail. Closing that overlay (click outside it, or Escape) drops you back on the home exactly where you left it.

The Hero row

At the top of the page, the Hero panel anchors the section on one number: your total vendor count, labeled "Vendor Stack" above it. Next to the count is a pill showing your average Verinode Score across the stack (for example "7.8 Avg Score"), colored by how that average reads: strong scores show in Expand green, mid-range in Maintain yellow, and weak in Analyse red.

Below the headline, a line of supporting text adapts to your data:

• If you have no vendors yet: "Add Data, your vendor stack appears here as soon as a contract, invoice, or screenshot lands."
• If any vendor is scoring below your benchmark: "N vendors scoring below your benchmark, review or replace."
• Otherwise: "N categories covered across your stack."

Two secondary figures sit to the right of the headline:

• Monthly Spend, the sum of the current billed amount across every active vendor relationship, labeled "Across Active Vendors."
• At Risk, the count of vendors scoring below the benchmark floor, labeled "Below Score Threshold" when the count is above zero, or "All Vendors Performing" when it is zero.

Take Action

The Take Action row is where Verinode puts things it wants you to look at or do something with. It always opens with two entry points, then fills in with whatever decisions are open:

• Find a Vendor. A tile reading "IQ shortlists the right fit from your data, process signals, and the network." Clicking Start opens a guided vendor selection flow: you describe what you need, and Verinode proposes matches drawn from your own data, the categories your business typically needs, and the vendor network, not a generic directory search.
• Ask IQ (the agent activation tile). Opens the AI panel already seeded with a vendors-specific prompt, so your first message to your Co-COO about vendors is one click away. This tile retires itself once you have had a conversation with the agent about this section.

If your vendor data is thin, an amber "Make Your Vendor Stack Work" or "Deepen Your Vendor Stack" tile appears, listing exactly which sources are still missing (vendor invoices for spend tracking and price benchmarking, contracts and renewals for renewal timing, and so on) and which are already in. This tile disappears once your vendor data is complete.

Beyond those, Take Action shows your open vendor decisions, one tile per decision, the first rendered larger (a "hero" tile) and the rest standard-sized. What appears here depends on your data:

• No vendors on file yet. A "Build your vendor stack" card walks through three quick moves: upload a recent vendor invoice (software, supplies, or equipment rental, any one will do), forward a renewal or contract email (set up auto-forward in Gmail or Outlook so renewals land here automatically), or paste a subscription receipt or quote (screenshots and PDFs both work). Underneath: "Decisions surface as contracts approach renewal or cost patterns shift," and a line reminding you the data is encrypted under a key scoped to you, never sold to carriers, and not browsable or exportable by any Verinode employee.
• Vendors exist, nothing flagged yet. "Still learning your stack, as your agent analyzes vendors, scores, and contract terms, top decisions will appear here."
• Vendors exist, every prior signal resolved. "Your vendor stack is clean, you've worked through N signals. New ones will surface as contracts approach renewal or cost patterns shift."
• Open decisions. Real decision tiles, each with a title, the dollar figure at stake, and what happens if you do nothing, click one to go straight into it.

Explore

Five metric tiles, always in this order: All Vendors, Avg Score, Coverage, Spend, Renewals. Each tile carries a small inline chart and, where a peer comparison exists, a delta line against the peer median. Clicking any tile opens the matching card in the overlay (Stack, Score, Coverage, Spend, or Renewals) for the full breakdown.

• All Vendors. Your total vendor count, with a sub-line reading the number of distinct categories your vendors span ("6 categories"). The bar-chart preview shows vendor count by category, largest categories first.
• Avg Score. Your stack's average Verinode Score, on a 1.0 to 10.0 scale. The sub-line reads either "N flagged" (vendors below your benchmark) or "stack healthy." When peer data is available, the tile shows your average against the peer median as a marker, colored good or bad depending on which side of the median you land on, with a delta line like "+0.3 vs peer." Without peer data it falls back to a sparkline of your own score spread.
• Coverage. The share of vendor categories a business shaped like yours typically has, that you actually have. Shown as a percentage in a ring chart. Which categories count, and which are "essential" for your business archetype, is derived from your profile (employee count and business shape), not a fixed checklist. The sub-line reads either "N essential gaps vs archetype" (colored as a warning) or "all essentials covered vs archetype." A peer delta appears when peer coverage data is available.
• Spend. Your total monthly spend across active vendors, labeled "per month," with a distribution chart of your seven largest vendor bills.
• Renewals. The count of contracts renewing in the next 90 days, with a segmented preview split into three urgency bands: 30 days or less (flagged), 31 to 60 days, and 61 to 90 days.

Local network

This row only appears when Verinode has found a gap, a vendor category common to businesses like yours where you have no provider on file at all. Each gap shows as a tile labeled "Local network" with the category name and "No provider on file." Clicking it opens ranked local recommendations for that category: providers near you, with a peer usage read (how commonly operators like you use that provider), public reputation ratings where available, and whether a provider is preferred within your franchise network. If there are no gaps, this row does not render.

Most recent

The bottom row lists your vendors as tiles, sorted by Verinode Score (highest first), up to 20 at a time. Each tile shows:

• The category name as the label pill at the top.
• The vendor's logo and name.
• The monthly cost as the headline figure (for example "$450/mo"), or a dash if no current amount is on file.
• The Verinode Score underneath, phrased as "7.8 Solid vs peers" when a benchmark label is available, or plain "Verinode Score 7.8" when it is not, or "Score forming" while Verinode is still building enough signal to rate the vendor.
• A "Renews Nd" badge in the corner when the contract renews within the next 90 days.

Clicking any tile opens that vendor's full detail card in the overlay.

Empty state. With no vendors on file, this row reads: "Vendors will appear as you forward contracts, drop invoices, or paste renewal emails."

How vendor data flows in

You never manually build the Vendors list from scratch. Everything on this page traces back to documents and connections you already have:

• Add Data (the button in the page header) opens the capture flow: drop a PDF, paste a screenshot, or forward an email, and Verinode extracts the vendor, category, cost, billing frequency, and renewal date directly from it.
• Forwarded emails. Set up auto-forwarding from Gmail or Outlook so renewal notices and vendor invoices land in Verinode automatically, no manual upload needed going forward. See Connecting your data and Forwarding documents.
• Guided vendor selection. Using "Find a Vendor" from Take Action creates a new vendor relationship as part of that flow, rather than through a manual "add vendor" form. This is the deliberate entry point for adding a vendor: Verinode always ties a new relationship to a real selection decision instead of a blank record.

Once a vendor relationship exists, editing details like billing amount, renewal date, or your own satisfaction rating from inside the overlay card updates the same record everywhere it appears on the page (the Stack tile, the Renewals row, the Spend row, and the detail card) without a page reload.

Behind the scenes, every vendor is matched to a category (from a shared catalog Verinode maintains) and, where enough data exists across the network, to a Verinode Score that reflects how that vendor performs. Verinode never sells your vendor data, spend, or ratings to carriers. Anonymized signal from your usage contributes to the same peer benchmarks that let you see how your stack compares.

Related articles

• How benchmarks work
• Reading a benchmark
• Connecting your data
• Forwarding documents
• The decision workspace
• Understanding your margin