What happens if a document type isn't yet supported by the scanning engine?

Behavior in this situation depends on how a given vendor's system is designed, but there are a few common approaches, and it's worth understanding them since no vendor, despite broad coverage claims, supports literally every document type in circulation globally.

The most graceful fallback relies on the fact that many unsupported documents still include a standard, ICAO-format MRZ, even if the vendor hasn't built a dedicated visual zone template for that specific document's layout. In this case, the system can often still extract core fields (name, date of birth, document number, expiry date) directly from the MRZ using the universal ICAO format, even without full visual zone field extraction, giving a business partial but still useful data rather than a complete failure.

For documents without a usable MRZ and without a dedicated template, the system typically can't extract structured data reliably and will generally either return an error indicating the document type wasn't recognized, or fall back to capturing a plain image of the document without structured field extraction, which a business can then route to manual review rather than losing the submission entirely.

Many vendors also treat unsupported document reports from customers as active input for expanding their template library, since real-world usage often surfaces document types or newer document generations that weren't part of the vendor's original coverage. A responsive vendor with a dedicated document research team can sometimes add support for a genuinely new or previously unsupported document type within a matter of weeks, particularly if it's a document type likely to matter for other customers too, not just the one reporting the gap.

For businesses in this situation, it's worth asking a vendor directly what their process is for handling unsupported document reports, and roughly how quickly new document support typically gets added, since this reflects how actively a vendor maintains and expands their coverage over time rather than treating it as a static, one-time list.

ScanDoc's engine falls back to MRZ-based extraction where a document lacks a dedicated visual zone template but does include a standard MRZ, and maintains a document research team that actively expands template coverage based on both broader market trends and specific customer-reported gaps.