What the documents look like
Franchise fee and deposit settlement centers on funds and breach deductions. It does not handle government filing. The main data sources are the finance system, franchise contracts, bank statements, and store violation records. Everyday documents include franchise fee invoices, deposit ledgers, deduction notices, and contract payment schedules. Data updates are monthly and on each deduction.
In cross-border and multilingual settings, one contract payment schedule may appear in different languages, with terms, currency, and payment-period wording spread across several paragraphs. Document parsing and chunking must preserve the constraint relationships between those paragraphs so retrieval results can point back to the document identity and version of the source text.
Constraints at the document chunking step
At the chunking step, a condition, its explanation, and the content it constrains should stay in the same paragraph group. The balance field in a deposit ledger and the reason field in a deduction notice belong to different original data records, and each may map to multiple indexes. Retrieval locates material; it does not perform authorization judgment. Semantic retrieval and the minimum relevance score affect content ordering only. They do not isolate unauthorized records or data belonging to different franchisees. Full-text retrieval suits numbers, contract numbers, and proper nouns. Semantic retrieval suits natural-language descriptions. Hybrid retrieval fuses multiple result paths through RRF. Rerank requires a model and is enabled according to settings.
Hypothetical paper exercise sample: one franchise contract payment schedule reads, "Party A shall pay the franchise fee of RMB 80,000 by March 31, 2025; the deposit of RMB 50,000 shall be paid within ten working days after signing." A separate deduction notice reads, "Due to a store violation, a deduction of RMB 5,000 from the deposit is proposed, pending approval by the franchise management department." The draft sentence to be assessed is, "The deposit deduction has been completed, and the balance is RMB 45,000." This draft lacks evidence of completed approval. The words "proposed" and "pending approval" in the deduction notice show that the request remains under review.
Configuration and implementation checks
| Configuration item | Hypothetical starting value for this exercise | Reason and comparison method |
|---|---|---|
| Search mode | Hybrid retrieval | Contract numbers and natural-language questions coexist; compare recall coverage against semantic retrieval alone |
| Minimum relevance | 0.3 | Hypothetical starting point; compare the number of remaining fragments after filtering against 0.5 |
| Reference limit | 3000 tokens | Hypothetical starting point; compare whether cited content covers the full payment schedule against 2000 |
| Question optimization | Enabled | Multi-turn follow-up scenario; compare retrieval-term completeness against disabled |
| Rerank | Enabled | Many candidate fragments; compare ranking positions against disabled |
| Segmentation basis | By contract clause and ledger row | Compare whether conditions and constraints stay in the same segment against fixed-length segmentation |
Three common errors
- Treating "proposed deduction" in a deduction notice as a completed deduction. Input is the deduction notice text; the compared fields are "proposed" and "pending approval"; the observable result is that the status remains under review.
- Merging the deposit ledger balance and the deduction notice reason into one field. Input is the two documents; compare subject, period, and field name; the observable result is that they belong to different original data records.
- Treating a retrieval hit as authorization approval. Input is a retrieval request; compare the retrieval result with authorization records; the observable result is that retrieval does not change approval status.
How to verify the setup
- Input the contract payment schedule text from the hypothetical sample. Compare whether the franchise fee amount and deposit amount are correctly chunked and kept in the same paragraph group. The observable result is that amount and payment period are not separated.
- Input the draft sentence to be assessed, "The deposit deduction has been completed, and the balance is RMB 45,000." Compare it with "proposed" and "pending approval" in the deduction notice. The observable result is that the sentence is unsupported, and the approval evidence gap must be recorded.
- Input the empty-result paper input []. Compare whether the downstream design distinguishes an empty result from lack of authorization. The observable result is that the downstream does not interpret an empty result as no permission.