What the documents look like
Franchise fee and deposit settlement centers on fund receipts, payments and penalty deductions. It does not carry government filing duties. The working materials are franchise fee invoices, deposit ledgers, deduction notices and contract payment schedules. Sources include the finance system, franchise contracts, bank statements and store violation records.
The defining feature for document parsing and chunking is that one payment can appear at the same time in a contract payment schedule, a deduction notice and a deposit ledger. Subject, period and amount fields need to be aligned across materials. Materials update monthly and on each deduction. Parsing output must retain the document identity and version that can point back to the source text. Without that, later comparison cannot confirm which material a given record came from.
A second feature matters for chunking. A payment schedule carries both a due-date clause and an amount. A deduction notice carries both a reason and a deduction figure. A deposit ledger carries a running balance. If a condition, an explanation and the content it constrains are split into separate chunks, retrieval may return the amount while losing the condition that qualifies it.
Constraints at the document chunking step
Chunking must follow the structure of each material. Conditions, notes and the content they constrain stay together. In a contract payment schedule, the payment term and the amount belong in the same chunk. In a deduction notice, the stated reason and the deducted amount belong in the same chunk.
One group of source data can map to multiple indexes. Source data and retrieval indexes are recorded separately. The same source record may carry several vector entries, and a hit on any one of them recalls that record.
Retrieval tests use terms, identifiers and natural-language questions separately, then observe how the chunking choice affects the actual comparison question. After a material changes, the actual training and index state must be checked. A successful upload does not by itself mean retrieval has updated.
Hypothetical drill sample: the source text reads, "Party A, a chain brand management company, and Party B, a franchisee, signed a franchise contract on March 1, 2025, agreeing that the franchise fee of RMB 120,000 is payable within 30 days of signing, and the deposit of RMB 50,000 is payable before opening. A deduction notice dated April 10, 2025 states that RMB 8,000 is deducted from the deposit because of a violation at Party B's store." The draft sentence to be assessed is, "Party B's deposit of RMB 50,000 has been received in full and no deduction has occurred." This draft sentence and the deduction fact recorded in the deduction notice take mutually exclusive values in the same field, so the draft sentence is unsupported.
Retrieval is a recall process. It does not perform authorization or entity isolation. A relevance score is not a category, entity or permission filter.
Configuration and implementation checks
| Configuration item | Hypothetical trial starting point | Reason and comparison method |
|---|---|---|
| Search mode | Hybrid search | Contract numbers and natural-language questions coexist, so precise and semantic matching are both needed |
| Minimum relevance | 0.3 | Hypothetical starting point, compared with 0.5 to observe the change in recall count |
| Reference limit | 3000 tokens | Hypothetical starting point, compared with 2000 to observe completeness of long contract chunks |
| Question optimization | Enabled | Multi-turn follow-up needs coreference resolution |
| Rerank | Enabled | Secondary ordering when candidates are numerous |
| Chunking method | By contract clause and notice structure | Keeps conditions and amounts from being split apart |
These values are hypothetical trial starting points for this page. They are not official defaults. The reference limit uses the documented unit, tokens, rather than a guessed item count. Rerank is a documented secondary ordering step, not a switch invented for this page.
Three common errors
- Treating a successful upload as an updated index. After a material is uploaded, training and index state must be checked separately. Compare the upload record with the actual retrieval result, and observe whether retrieval can recall the new content.
- Treating semantic similarity as a permission filter. A similarity score does not distinguish franchisee identity or authorization scope. Compare the content returned for queries from different subjects, and observe whether records outside the authorized scope appear.
- Treating a pending review request as an executed deduction. A deduction notice states a deduction reason. Compare it with the deposit ledger balance, and observe whether the two agree. A pending status does not show that the deduction has been completed. A pending request is not approval, and an offered option is not execution.
How to verify the setup
- Input the hypothetical sample source text and the draft sentence. Compare the draft sentence "Party B's deposit of RMB 50,000 has been received in full and no deduction has occurred" with the deduction notice entry "RMB 8,000 deducted." The condition is met when retrieval returns both materials and the draft sentence is marked unsupported.
- Input the contract number. Compare whether the returned chunk contains both the payment term and the amount. The chunking is complete when "within 30 days" and "RMB 120,000" appear in the same chunk.
- Input an empty-result scenario, using the paper input [] to check the downstream design. Observe how the system handles an empty reference return. No claim is made that a fictional rule necessarily returns an empty result. Where evidence is missing, the gap stays recorded.
Authorization boundaries stay explicit. Forms collect values; business verification, approval, database writes and external synchronization require their stated downstream implementation. A pending request is not approval. An unsigned termination is not a completed termination. Where a document field is not provided, its value is unknown.