Acceptance spec: ChurchWise Church Office Compliance Kit, Phase 1 (free tools)

Status: DRAFT. Decisions marked FOUNDER are final; items marked PENDING need a founder answer before build. Owner: founder · Drafted: 2026-09-25 (Chief of Staff session) Research: knowledge/drafts/product-opportunities-2026-09/00-synthesis.md (reports 01–05) Decisions: DECISION_LOG.md 2026-09-25 (ChurchWise sub-brand; no lawyer review; multi-model adversarial review plus disclaimer)

Why

• Search results for church compliance chores (clergy housing, bylaws, child-protection policy, donation receipts) are thin: scanned PDFs, single-denomination templates, and tax-software help pages. Canada is barely served. A spot-check found no Canadian clergy residence-deduction calculator.
• Free, accurate, well-cited tools can rank in Google and be cited by AI answer engines. Each tool leads a church treasurer, secretary or pastor into ChurchWise and then into paid plans.
• AI-wary churches will use these because they are presented as tools and templates, not "AI".

Founder decisions (final)

1. The brand is ChurchWise, a sub-brand of ChurchWiseAI Ltd for AI-quiet products. Pages say "ChurchWise", with "a ChurchWiseAI Ltd product" in the footer only.
2. The Compliance Kit free tools ship first. The Life-Event Service Builder comes next and gets its own spec.
3. No lawyer review. Accuracy comes from:
   • a multi-model adversarial review (Opus 5.5, Fable 5.1, Codex);
   • every rule cited to a primary source and date-stamped;
   • a prominent disclaimer telling churches to have their own lawyer or accountant review;
   • a limitation-of-liability clause in the Terms.

PENDING founder decisions (one at a time, in this order)

1. Domain.
   • churchwise.ca: RDAP returned "not found" on 2026-09-25, and the same lookup found google.ca, so it looks available. Needs buying.
   • churchwise.com: registered in 2004, expires 2026-11-25. We could make an offer or watch for it to lapse.
   • churchwise.co: the RDAP check doesn't work for .co, so its status is unknown.
   • Recommendation: buy churchwise.ca now.
2. Paid tier behind the free tools. For example, "ChurchWise Office" at $9.95/mo: saved documents, a yearly receipt run for the whole congregation, and renewal reminders. The alternative is no paid tier in Phase 1, with the tools feeding the existing $29/$79/$99 plans. Recommendation: no new paid tier in Phase 1; measure traffic first.
3. Email gate. Recommendation: generate for free with no email needed. Offer an optional "email me a copy" with a CASL-compliant express-consent checkbox.

Scope: four tools

#	Tool	Jurisdictions	Output
T1	Clergy housing calculator. US: housing allowance (IRC §107). Canada: clergy residence deduction (line 23100, form T1223).	US federal; Canada federal plus a Québec TP-76 note	On-screen result with a worked calculation. A PDF summary, plus a draft board resolution designating the housing allowance (US).
T2	Bylaws / constitution generator	Canada: CNCA (federal) and ONCA (Ontario) first. US: generic non-profit religious corporation, with state notes	.docx and PDF
T3	Child and vulnerable-person protection policy generator	Canada and US, with provincial and state duty-to-report notes	.docx and PDF
T4	Donation receipt generator	Canada: CRA official donation receipt. US: IRS written acknowledgment (Pub 1771) and year-end giving statement	PDF receipts, one at a time or from a CSV upload

Out of scope for Phase 1: accounts or logins, saved documents, the start-a-church guide, French versions (Phase 2, but the layout must allow a /fr path), and all other provinces and states beyond the notes above.

Expected output (the customer's view)

Discovery (AEO/GEO)

1. Each tool has its own page, at a URL like /clergy-housing-calculator, /church-bylaws-template, /child-protection-policy-template or /donation-receipt-template.
2. Each page is laid out in this order:
   1. A one-paragraph direct answer at the top, e.g. "In Canada, a member of the clergy can deduct the lesser of…".
   2. The tool.
   3. A plain-language explainer.
   4. A "Rules this tool follows" list, where each rule links to its primary source and shows "checked YYYY-MM-DD".
   5. An FAQ.
   6. The disclaimer.
3. Structured data: SoftwareApplication or WebApplication, FAQPage, HowTo where it fits, and Organization naming ChurchWise and ChurchWiseAI Ltd. The page text is readable with JavaScript turned off, meaning server-rendered.
4. The pages are listed in the host's sitemap.xml and llms.txt, allowed in robots.txt, and submitted through IndexNow.
5. There is no "AI" wording anywhere on the page, meta tags or structured data. The FAQ has one honest item, "Is this made with AI?", answered along the lines of: "We use modern software, including AI, to help draft templates. Every rule is checked against the official source linked above, and nothing replaces your own review."

Using a tool

6. It works on a phone at 375px wide, with no horizontal scrolling.
7. It uses plain words, suited to a volunteer treasurer. Every input explains itself with a help text.
8. Results appear instantly. Downloads work without an account.
9. Disclaimer, in all three places:
   • On the page, before generating: "General information, not legal or tax advice. Laws differ by province and state and change over time. Have a qualified lawyer or accountant review before your church adopts or relies on this." It comes with a required checkbox: "I understand this is not legal or tax advice."
   • In the footer of every generated document: the same wording, plus "Generated by ChurchWise on YYYY-MM-DD. Rules checked YYYY-MM-DD." and the source list.
   • In the Terms of Service: an as-is / no-warranty clause and a limitation-of-liability clause covering ChurchWise free tools. This needs a Terms update in the same PR.
10. Generated documents are editable (.docx for T2 and T3), carry the church's name, and have no ChurchWise branding in the body. A small "Made with ChurchWise" line appears in the footer only.
11. No personal data is stored on the server. Receipt data (donor names, amounts) is processed in the browser or in memory only, is never written to the database, and is never logged. This is stated on the page.

Special situations (FOUNDER, 2026-09-25: "show users that we are aware of these exceptions")

14. Before asking for numbers, each calculator asks short screening questions: both spouses clergy? church-provided housing for only part of the year? living in Québec? retired minister? (US) is the pay reasonable for the work? If one applies, the tool says so clearly, explains in plain words why the case is different, cites the official source, and tells the user what to take to their accountant. Where a partial result is still safe to show (for example the federal amount for a Québec pastor), it shows that result, clearly labelled.
15. Each tool page has a visible section, "Special situations this calculator does not compute", listing every handling: refer rule from the sources yaml with a one-line reason and a source link. It is generated from the rules data, so it cannot drift from the calculator. It is also emitted as FAQ items for search engines and AI answer engines.
16. The results panel always lists which special situations were checked and ruled out, e.g. "Checked: not a two-clergy household, not Québec, full-year housing". The user can see the tool considered them.

Conversion (soft)

12. After a download, show one quiet card: "ChurchWise can also answer your church phone, run your website and more", linking to the churchwiseai.com plans. No pop-ups and no email required.
13. Visits and downloads are tracked per tool, by aggregate count only.

Accuracy gate: required before any tool goes live

For each tool, the PR must include knowledge/products/churchwise/sources/<tool>.yaml. Each rule in it has:

• the rule text;
• the primary source URL (canada.ca/CRA, irs.gov, laws-lois.justice.gc.ca, ontario.ca/laws, or the provincial or state statute);
• a quoted source excerpt;
• the date it was checked.

Then comes the adversarial review:

1. Three independent reviewers each get the tool's logic, templates, test cases and sources yaml, with instructions to find errors, omissions, stale law and misleading wording:
   • Opus 5.5
   • Fable 5.1
   • Codex, via codex:rescue / dispatch.mjs
2. Every finding goes into knowledge/products/churchwise/reviews/<tool>-<date>.md with a resolution: fixed, or rejected with the source quote that proves it wrong.
3. Ship condition: every finding is resolved, plus a final pass by one reviewer that raises no new substantive finding.
4. Calculators (T1) need a unit-test table of at least 10 worked cases per jurisdiction, each hand-derived from the source formula and cross-checked by at least two reviewers, including the edge cases: part-year, rent vs own, the cap, zero income, and Québec.
5. Re-check cadence: a monthly job re-fetches every source URL and flags any change in content or HTTP status as a founder action item. There is an annual full re-review before each tax season, in January.

Hosting and engineering notes

• The code lives in churchwiseai-web (all products do). The ChurchWise host is served by host rewrite, like funeralwiseai.com → /funeralwiseai/*.
• Middleware and custom-domain routing affect every customer. A change there needs the full paying-customer smoke, per the Verification Ladder rung 3b, plus independent QA sign-off.
• Until the domain is bought, nothing is routed. Pages can be built and previewed on a Vercel preview URL only.
• Check FEATURE_REGISTRY.md and add a "ChurchWise Compliance Kit" entry in the same PR (Rule #14).

Test plan: run on the REAL ChurchWise host before declaring done

1. Test each tool with Playwright. Fill it, check the result is correct for 3 known cases, download the file, and open it to confirm the content, the disclaimer footer and the church name.
2. Emulate a 375px mobile screen, and run with JavaScript turned off to confirm the page's answer text still renders.
3. Validate the structured data on the live page with Google's Rich Results Test.
4. Confirm the disclaimer checkbox blocks generation until ticked.
5. On a receipt CSV upload, the network log shows no request carrying donor data to our servers.
6. Grep the rendered HTML for "AI" (as a whole word). The only allowed hits are the FAQ item and "ChurchWiseAI Ltd" in the footer and Organization schema.
7. Run the paying-customer smoke if middleware changed.
8. Attach the evidence (Playwright artifact and screenshots) to the PR.