jorgecuadros-platform/docs/POLICY_OCR.md

Insurance Policy OCR Capture

Reads an insurance policy PDF the office downloads from a carrier portal, proposes the Policy row it should become, and lets staff confirm. Built 2026-08-01 (5e9cb12), live under /polizas/captura.

Why this exists — it was not planned

This feature is not in any spec. It came out of building the utility statement OCR intake in RECEIPT_CAPTURE_SPEC.md §2: once there was a working render → OCR → parse → match → review pipeline for CFE/CESPT/Telnor receipts, it was obvious the same shape applies to the other stack of paper this office keys in by hand every week — the carrier policy PDFs behind every Policy row.

The two are the same job with a different document on the scanner. Keeping that recognition cheap is the whole point of how it was built: the pipeline was reused, not copied.

• OcrModule (apps/api/src/ocr/ocr.module.ts) was extracted out of StatementsModule in this same commit, purely so PolicyOcrModule can inject OCR_PROVIDER without dragging in the statement pipeline. StatementsModule now imports it and binds nothing itself. That extraction was blocking: without it the policy module could not resolve the provider at all.
• The engine stays Tesseract behind the same swappable seam, so a managed extraction API remains a one-line change in one file for both features.
• The intake screen is a mode of the existing policy-creation screen, the same way OCR receipt capture is a mode of Captura — not a new menu entry.

What ships

Piece	Path
API module	apps/api/src/policy-ocr/ (service, controller, DTOs, matcher, parser)
Shared OCR seam	apps/api/src/ocr/ocr.module.ts
Tables	policy_ocr_batches, policy_ocr_documents (20260801000000_policy_ocr_intake)
Web	components/PolicyCaptura.tsx (tab shell), PolicyOcrIntake.tsx (upload), PolicyOcrReview.tsx (review queue)
Abilities	policy:ingest, policy:ocr-review — both STAFF

Abilities are STAFF for the same reason statement OCR is: nothing reaches the books unconfirmed, and the review step is what makes machine capture safe at that tier.

The screen

PolicyCaptura is one screen with two ways in, mirroring Captura.tsx:

• /polizas/nuevo → manual tab (PolicyForm, every field by hand)
• /polizas/captura → automática tab (PolicyOcrIntake, drop a PDF)
• /polizas/captura/[id] → the batch review queue

Both modes end at the same place — a Policy row on a customer's file — so they are modes of one screen rather than two menu entries. Either URL renders the same component, so the tab toggle works from either entry point and old bookmarks land on the right tab.

Pipeline

upload PDF → store source → render pages → text layer? → parse → match → review → confirm

1. Store the source. policy-ocr/{batchId}/source-N.pdf, before anything else touches it.
2. Render + read. Every page is rendered to policy-ocr/{batchId}/page-M.png. Text-layer wins when the PDF has one (cheap, exact); the rendered image is OCR'd only when it does not — the same precedence rule as the statement pipeline. Carrier-portal PDFs are usually born-digital, so most of the time no OCR runs at all.
3. Parse. Provider detected by brand signal first (GMX, Grupo Mexicano de Seguros, gmx.com.mx, JUNTOS EL RIESGO ES MENOR), layout patterns only as fallback — the same ordering rule the statement parser needed.
4. Match. Against Policy.policyNumber.
5. Review + confirm. Nothing is written to Policy until a human confirms.

One PDF = one policy

This is the sharpest difference from statement OCR, and it inverts that feature's core assumption.

Utility statements arrive bundled, one customer per page — so there, one page is one document and the parser runs per page. A policy PDF is the opposite: the GMX certificate is a 2-page document where page 1 carries the contract header and page 2 carries the per-coverage table (and the PVL especificación runs to ten), and every page describes the same policy. So the pipeline concatenates every page's text (\n\n between pages, which also keeps ocrRawText readable for debugging) and runs the parser and the matcher exactly once per file.

Consequences worth knowing before touching this code:

• PolicyOcrDocument.pageNumber is repurposed as the file ordinal within the batch (1, 2, 3…), not a page index. The (batchId, pageNumber) unique constraint still holds, and one batch still carries many policies — one per uploaded file.
• Parser regexes are anchored across the whole concatenated text (^From$, ^Currency\s+…), which is why the page-boundary blank line matters.
• ocrConfidence on the row is the mean across the file's pages.
• A file that fails to parse produces exactly one OCR_FAILED row — the right granularity, and the page PNGs stay on disk for a re-run after a parser fix.

storageKey is the source PDF, not a page image

PolicyOcrDocument.storageKey points at source-N.pdf. The review screen embeds that file directly, so the reviewer looks at the exact artifact the office received and gets the browser's native PDF scrolling, zoom and text selection for free. Rendered PNGs are still written for future re-OCR or an image-based audit, but nothing points at them as the document's identity.

(The statement side does the opposite — there storageKey is the page image, because a page is the document.)

Matching: policy number only, never the insured name

PolicyMatcherService matches on Policy.policyNumber and nothing else.

The certificate's "Insured" line is the account's registrant, which drifts from the customer the office actually holds the file under — the same finding the statement matcher is built around (a CESPT receipt reading ARNAIZ ROSAS ELSA AURORA for a customer this office holds as CATT, RANDY). Names are shown to the reviewer as a sanity check and never feed matching.

Rows on policyNumber	Result
exactly 1	MATCHED, confident — the only unambiguous hit
0	new policy: review offers a customer picker, confirm creates the row
>1	surfaced as candidates, human picks

More than one hit is never auto-resolved. Duplicate policy numbers across customers do occur (one group policy bound by two related parties), and picking arbitrarily would silently book the wrong coverage against the wrong person.

GMX ships two unrelated documents for the same policy

The office downloads both from the same portal, and either can land in a batch. They share only the brand and the policy number, so parseGmx is a two-line dispatcher over two real parsers — both returning provider: "GMX", because the matcher keys on the policy number alone and must not care which artifact was uploaded.

	Caratula (…_Traduccion.pdf)	Especificación (…-CondicionesParticulares.pdf)
Language	English (free translation)	Spanish
Shape	boxed header table + 4-column coverage table	10 pages of prose, no tables at all
Header fields	Policy / Insured / Broker / Term / From / To / Currency	insured name, risk location, property description
Dates, broker, currency field	yes	none printed
Coverages	one row per risk	section heading + Límite Máximo de Responsabilidad:
Parser	parseGmxCaratula	parseGmxEspecificacion

Selected by isEspecificacion on the PVL page header (ESPECIFICACIÓN QUE SE ADHIERE, PVL Hogar, Nombre del asegurado).

Three things about the especificación are worth knowing before touching it:

• The policy number's group widths differ between the two. The caratula reads 007-037-07005947-0000-02 and the especificación 07-037-07006957-00000-01 — 2 digits in the first group, 5 in the fourth. The original parser pinned the widths, so it read one family and returned null on the other. POLICY_NUMBER_SHAPE now matches the shape, and since the especificación prints the number on all ten page headers, the ten readings cross-check each other (disagreement is noted, not resolved — the same rule the zona federal parser applies to its clave).

• Coverages are found by anchoring on the limit label and walking backwards for the heading. There is no row shape to match. A heading is a short line preceded by a blank line — that last condition is the whole trick, since length alone cannot tell a heading from the wrapped tail of the paragraph above it (efectuados., Y CADA PÉRDIDA.), and without it coverages get named after the last word of the preceding prose.

• Vigencia, agente and prima are absent by design, not unread. The parser says so in a note, so a reviewer seeing three empty fields does not read it as a broken parse.

  These three are keyed in by hand — confirmed 2026-08-14 with Luz, who handles GMX policies at the office. The review screen already has editable inputs for all three, and postPremium enables off the typed premium, so a hand-entered prima posts to the ledger exactly like a parsed one. No code change was needed to support this; it is a process decision, recorded here because the parser's own note now instructs the reviewer accordingly.

  A blank vigencia is silently permanent. Policy.policyTo is nullable and the renewals window query filters policyTo: { gte, lte } (renewals.service.ts), so a policy confirmed without one never matches and never gets a renewal notice — no error, no warning, and nothing later notices. This is why the parser's note names the consequence instead of just listing the missing fields.

An excluded catastrophic risk is recorded as excluded in the risk label (Terremoto o erupción volcánica — Sección Edificio: EXCLUIDO) with a null amount, never as 0: a coverage insured for zero and an excluded coverage are the same number and very different facts, and ParsedCoverage has no field for the distinction.

What the parser reads, and the field it cannot

ParsedPolicy fields are all nullable on purpose: each carrier prints a different subset, and the matcher and review queue both work better with "field was read" vs "field was not" than with a guess.

Read from the GMX certificate: policy number, insured name, additional insured, broker (→ Policy.agentName), legal address, ZIP, policyFrom / policyTo / policyDate, currency, premium-payment cadence, and the full per-coverage table (risk, insured amount, deductible, loss participation) preserved verbatim.

The GMX certificate carries no premium. Not "sometimes missing" — the document does not have the figure. It lives on GMX's separate recibo PDF. The parser leaves netPremium / policyFee / brokerFee / total null and pushes a note onto the row — "esta página no trae prima; revisar el recibo de GMX por separado" — so the reviewer sees why the field is empty rather than assuming a read failure.

This is also why confirm never overwrites an existing Policy.netPremium with null: the certificate not carrying a premium is not evidence that the premium is gone.

Deductible and loss participation are stored as strings ("5%", "20%", "USD 1,000") — they are printed as a mix of percentages, currency amounts and free text, and normalising them would lose the distinction.

Confirm: what actually gets written

Per confirmed document, in order:

1. The Policy row — updated if a policy was matched, created under the picked customer if not. Only non-null extracted* fields are written; null never overwrites existing data.
2. A PolicyDocument — the source PDF is streamed into the policy's storage namespace and attached, so the paperwork stays with the policy.
3. Optionally a Transaction — INSURANCE domain, negative amount (a charge), captureSource: "OCR", captureRef = the document id.

The ledger write is opt-in twice over: staff must tick postPremium and a premium must have parsed to a positive number. Without that gate the premium-less certificate above would silently book a $0 charge on every confirm.

createdPolicyId and postedTransactionId are unique columns on the document row, so a double-confirm cannot re-apply — and a POSTED document is refused outright.

Discarding a batch is refused once any page is POSTED: a partly-applied batch has already written Policy (and possibly Transaction) rows, and hiding the paperwork behind a "discarded" label would leave those rows unexplained. Reject the remaining pages individually instead.

API surface

Method	Route	Ability
GET	/policy-ocr/status (is OCR + storage available)	authenticated
GET	/policy-ocr/batches, /batches/:id, /batches/:id/documents	authenticated
GET	/policy-ocr/documents/:id/page (streams the source PDF)	authenticated
POST	/policy-ocr/batches (upload)	policy:ingest
PATCH	/policy-ocr/documents/:id (edit the extracted fields)	policy:ocr-review
POST	/policy-ocr/documents/:id/reject	policy:ocr-review
POST	/policy-ocr/batches/:id/discard	policy:ocr-review
POST	/policy-ocr/batches/:id/confirm	policy:ocr-review

Requirements

Same as statement OCR: object storage (S3_ENDPOINT + credentials) for the source PDFs and page images, and tesseract-ocr / tesseract-ocr-data-spa / poppler-utils in the API image. GET /policy-ocr/status reports both; if either is missing the feature reports itself unavailable and only this feature is disabled.

Tests

apps/api/src/policy-ocr/parsers/policy-parser.spec.ts — 24 cases against verbatim text extracted from two real documents, indentation and blank lines included (the column positions are what the parser reads, so a cleaned-up fixture would test nothing).

From HC_Folio_000767_Traduccion.pdf (caratula): provider detection from the wordmark and from the footer URL, the header fields, every coverage row off the second page, the deductible/loss-participation strings, the missing-premium note, the broker line with the agent-number parens absent, and a page with no GMX signal at all (which must yield no provider rather than a bad guess).

From 007_LGS-HGMX_07006957_01_0-CondicionesParticulares.pdf (especificación): the differently-grouped policy number, the risk location read across its wrapped line, the empty Asegurado Adicional cell that must not capture the next line, the absent-by-design fields, currency taken from the USD limits rather than the M.N. sublimits in the body prose, a limit split under Edificio / Contenidos sub-labels, a limit printed on the label's own line, a deductible stated as a sentence above its limit, a sublimit block whose amount sits after both a blank line and a page break, the excluded earthquake coverage, and the hydrometeorological deductible and coinsurance pulled from their own per-zone block.

Four of those are regression tests for ways the parser can silently attach the wrong value rather than none — a neighbouring coverage's prose read as a deductible, the page-level DEDUCIBLES: paragraph read as one, a coverage named after a wrapped prose tail, and one section's per-zone deductible adopted by the coverage above it. Each was a real defect caught by running the parser against the full ten-page document.

Not built

• Only GMX. The dispatcher (detectPolicyProvider) is a table of [provider, pattern] pairs plus a parsers map, so adding ANA or Qualitas is a parser function and two entries — but no other carrier's layout has been seen yet, and guessing at one produces a parser nobody can verify.
• The recibo PDF. Reading the premium off GMX's separate receipt document, and pairing it to the certificate it belongs to, is the obvious next piece. It is what would let postPremium stop being a manual tick.
• Renewals from OCR. A re-issued policy arrives as a new certificate with the same number; confirm updates the existing row rather than versioning it. Nothing tracks "this is the 2027 issue of that policy".

Related

• STATEMENT_OCR.md — the utility statement pipeline this was lifted from, as built. RECEIPT_CAPTURE_SPEC.md §2 is its design and the measured evidence behind it. Between them they are the origin of three rules the policy parser applies: detect the provider by brand before layout, only ever apply the Tesseract digit-confusion map (O→0, S→5, B→8, …) to fields known to be digits, and parse amounts by separator position rather than assuming , is thousands.

  Those last two are duplicated on purpose, not imported: the module is kept self-contained, since sharing a helper would couple two unrelated domains through it. If you fix a bug in one, check the other.

• INSURANCE_FEATURES_SPEC.md — the four insurance features that were planned. This is not one of them.