Verifying a 300-page draw package in minutes

The demo version of a document AI reads a clean 15-page pay application and looks magical. The production version reads a 300-page draw package - a general contractor's cover sheet and continuation, followed by dozens of subcontractor applications, each with its own invoices and waivers, half of them scanned at fax quality - and has to be right about all of it.

Plan first, then read

You can't feed a bundle that size to a single model call: there are hard limits on how many pages go in and how much structure comes out. So the package is first planned into its logical documents - this is the GC's G702, this span is its G703, these pages are the mechanical sub's application, these are its invoices - and each piece is processed on its own. When the planner isn't confident, the system falls back to fixed-size overlapping windows rather than guessing. It never skips a page and never silently drops content.

A subcontractor's own G702 buried on page 192 must not hijack the general contractor's contract sum. Getting that right is the difference between a demo and a product.

Keeping the money attributed correctly

The subtle failures in large packages aren't about reading - they're about attribution. A sub's continuation sheet inside the bundle has to be recognized as supporting evidence for the GC's line, not merged into the GC's own schedule of values. If a drywall sub's $47,200 draw gets misattributed to the GC's framing line, the downstream math check passes with flying colors and the error reaches certification - a false positive the human reviewer can't catch because everything on screen appears consistent. Citations have to be remapped to absolute page numbers in code so a finding always opens the right child document. Get the plumbing right and the reviewer gets the same clean, cited result they'd get from a 15-page app - just for a package twenty times the size.

That's the bar: the hard document is the normal document. The reviewer shouldn't have to care how big the package was - only what they need to decide.