Few sectors have to deal with as many complexities in financial management and reporting as the mining industry.

Some of their specific requirements include:

• Accounting for costs and returns across each phase of the mining process
• Implementing multiple financial rule sets at the same time to make provision for regulations across different countries or jurisdictions
• Managing financial reporting across multiple languages and currencies
• Reporting on a variety of specific statistics and KPIs such as operating data, financial data, HSE data and commercial reports 
• In order to gain a good handle on costs and spending, miners need to have the capability to drill down into financial reports to the right level of granularity. 
• They may also need to generate reports to cover each phase of the mining. This enables you to compare operations across your organisation for informed decision-making and financial reporting. 

From strategic planning, to reporting, to analysis, mines need solutions that can help them react quickly and effectively to a changing environment. Implementing an intelligent approach to financial planning, budgeting and reporting can result in improved budgeting efficiency and accuracy for mining companies of all sizes.

Here are a few key benefits of leveraging purpose-built EPM software:

Time Savings: Give analysts time back to perform value-added tasks and meaningful analysis that leads to better insights by eliminating time spent troubleshooting buggy spreadsheets and digging through rows of data to fix mis-keys or errors.

Better Collaboration: Eliminate long email threads with multiple attachments and version control issues by bringing together different teams in a single application and ensure everyone speaks the same language and gets on the same page by allowing everyone’s voice to be heard in the planning process.

Improved Forecast Accuracy: Decrease erroneous changes and track plain performance to drive better insights that lead to improved forecast cycles, better/cleaner data and more accurate forecasts

Data Integration: Ensure alignment in all business areas by tracking progress against the plan by leveraging insights from all available data – EPM software allows for various points of data integration, bringing in data from operational and financial sources to avoid missed insights.

Workflow Capabilities: Ensure no parts of the review and approval process are missed.  

Auditability: Allow for drill-back capability into transaction-level data, and ensure confidence in the numbers with built-in financial intelligence.

Built-In Excel Functionality: Leverage spreadsheets as intended – as flexible, on-the-fly tools for ad-hoc analysis – to drive the flexibility spreadsheets allow for data analysis and gain control of the connection back to the source data in EPM software.

Planning agility: A robust financial solution isn’t complete without the functionality to easily adapt to changes in the corporate structure and operating environment.

Corporate assumption management: The ability to reforecast assumptions to the plan is severely hindered when it is undertaken on cumbersome, siloed Excel files. Generating ‘what-if’ scenarios is often time-consuming and prone to error, therefore reducing visibility and insight into a mining company’s financial big picture.

Trust in the budgeting process: Due to the lack of deep analytic functionality contained on Excel spreadsheets, coupled with a reliance on manual data entry in the creation of budgets and forecasts, mine-site financial managers often lack confidence in financial outcomes.

Futuresense helps miners gain the benefits of a world-class EPM solution that leverages technology to innovate, scale, and operationalise their financial systems.