Turning a Government Pay Calendar PDF into Structured, Verifiable Data

Portal Fone — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 18:01:48 +0000

Every year, Mexico's DGSANEF publishes the FONE education payroll calendar as an annex (Anexo IX) — essentially a document designed for humans to read, not for machines. Hundreds of thousands of federalized teachers depend on those dates, yet the information lives in a format that is hard to search, hard to verify, and easy to misquote on social media.

At PortalFone we turned that annex into a structured, quincena-by-quincena calendar page, and the process taught us a few things about working with official documents as data:

1. Model the domain, not the document. A FONE "pay date" is not one date. Each quincena has ordinary dispersion, extraordinary dispersion, and check delivery — and dispersion (when payroll leaves for the banks) is not the same as deposit (when a teacher's bank posts it). Collapsing those into a single "payday" field is how misinformation starts.

2. Every date needs a source trail. Each entry keeps its provenance: Anexo IX, DGSANEF. When a date is rumored on WhatsApp groups — which happens every November around the aguinaldo — the answer is never "trust us", it is "here is the annex".

3. Validate identifiers before you validate dates. Teachers reach the calendar through payroll systems that key on CURP and RFC. A single wrong character breaks access long before any calendar matters, which is why we also built a small client-side CURP/RFC structure validator that checks format and verifier digit entirely in the browser — no data leaves the device.

The result is a single canonical page — the calendario de pagos FONE 2026 — updated whenever the official source changes, instead of a new PDF screenshot circulating every fortnight.

If you work with government documents in any country, the pattern generalizes: respect the domain distinctions, keep provenance per field, and publish one canonical, linkable version.

PortalFone is an independent guide for Mexico's federalized teachers; it is not an official SEP website.

DEV Community: Portal Fone

Turning a Government Pay Calendar PDF into Structured, Verifiable Data