InSite Month End Accounting – Tips & Tricks

By

 

Most mine sites using GEOVIA InSite for Production Management will benefit from it’s Month-End Accounting capabilities. Here are some Tips & Tricks to get the most out of InSite’s month-end procedures and tools.

 

Month-End Surveys with Daily Production Statistics together in one place

InSite’s Stockpile Management module can bring together all of your daily production measurements as well as last month’s official inventory/survey measurements for an in-shift view of inventory. As soon as information is available about production movements in and out of inventory locations, Stockpile Management can calculate estimated inventories, including Quantities (i.e. Volume, Tonnes) and Qualities (i.e. Density, Grades). This is great for in-shift inventory visualization, but also provides the basis for the month-end production accounting process.

Knowing the opening measurements, inputs, outputs, and then closing measurements provided with a month-end process, InSite has all of the ingredients to help you adjust discrepancies in the detailed daily data from official month-end measurements.

One of the biggest challenges with month-end processes at mine-sites is typically that month-end surveys can take some time to perform and may happen on different days in the month in preparation for month-end. One of the great capabilities of InSite’s Stockpile Management module is that it can help you to convert Survey Periods (typically mid-month to mid-month) to Accounting Periods for financial reporting purposes. Because Stockpile Management recalculates inventories for each day automatically, it can provide the most accurate month-end inventory amount for the last day of the month, even when surveys are provided several days prior.

 

 

 

 

Ore & Waste Material Balance for Month-End Adjustments/Reconciliation

Once Surveys are provided and balanced to the end of the Accounting Period, InSite’s Material Balance module can be used to adjust daily production measurements from actual. There are several practices for adjusting daily measurements from actual, and InSite supports all of them.

The most common approach is to balance the Ore Plant/Mill-Feed back through each material movement to the initial primary mining locations, taking into consideration any inventory left behind or depleted along the way.

Once the Ore is balanced, you can use InSite’s Material Balance module to balance the Waste also. For example, most open pit mines will survey the mining benches in the pit. Waste can either be separated from Ore as part of the survey process (where possible), or directly with InSite once the Ore Reconciliation process is complete. Either way, the waste bench surveys can be applied to adjust the daily production waste measurements at the primary mining location, again from actual. Graham Allen has previously written an excellent article on Calculating Waste Production using InSite Material Balance.

 

 


Monthly Site Reporting Package

With a fully reconciled/adjusted period, generate your standard or custom InSite Monthly Reporting Package that incorporates all of your production KPIs in an official multi-page report.

 

Accounting Period Locks

Using InSite’s Accounting Period Locks to partially or fully close the period, can provide your organization with confidence that officially reported numbers can be accurately generated and analyzed for historical periods. Mariana Nobile has previously written an excellent article on Locking Data via Accounting Periods in GEOVIA InSite.

 

 

 

Integration with Financial ERP

InSite is a great tool for streamlining, automating, and controlling the month-end accounting process for mining operations. Keep in mind, the outputs of an InSite Month-End can also be automatically synchronized with downstream financial processes and systems (i.e. ERP). This is not only a time-saver, but also provides a robust approach to systematically reconciling month-end information using the most accurate information possible, in a secure and fully auditable way. If your mining organization struggles with accounting regulatory reporting requirements, InSite will certainly improve auditability and streamline auditing processes for you.

 

 

 

 

0
Shaun Macrae

Shaun Macrae

Senior Business Analyst/Project Manager, GEOVIA at Dassault Systèmes
Shaun MacRae delivers Enterprise Mine Production Management solutions to the mining industry in North America. He has been working in the mining systems consulting space for the past 10 years, deploying Enterprise Mining solutions in Canada, Mexico, Bulgaria, Australia, South Africa, and the United States. Shaun is currently based in Alberta, Canada and specializes in GEOVIA InSite, Enterprise Architecture, and Project Management for highly scalable Mining Software deployments.