GeoMate
Why QAQC is a reporting requirement, not a formality
Under JORC and NI 43-101, a competent or qualified person must be able to state that the sample data underpinning a resource is reliable. That statement is only defensible if quality controls were inserted into the sampling stream and their results were monitored throughout the campaign — not reconstructed afterwards. In practice this means every batch sent to the lab carries certified reference materials (standards), blanks and duplicates, and every returned batch is checked before the assays are trusted.
The three control types and what each one catches
Standards test accuracy: a certified reference material has a known grade, so a result outside its tolerance window flags an analytical bias or a swapped sample. Blanks test contamination: barren material returning grade points to carry-over in preparation or the instrument. Duplicates test precision: re-assaying the same material — field, coarse or pulp duplicates — reveals how repeatable the whole chain is. A healthy QAQC programme inserts all three at a defined rate (commonly around one control per twenty samples) and defines pass/fail rules before the first batch ships.
Monitor with control charts, not spreadsheets after the fact
Control charts turn raw control results into a signal you can act on: standards plotted against their certified mean with ±2 and ±3 standard-deviation limits make drift and single failures obvious the day a batch returns. Reviewing this continuously lets you quarantine and re-assay a suspect batch while the material is still available — far cheaper than discovering a systematic bias at resource estimation. GeoMate ships 25+ validation rules across collar, survey, interval, assay, recovery and structure tables, with QAQC plotting and auto-correction so this monitoring is part of the daily workflow rather than a month-end scramble.
Make the audit trail a by-product of the work
The final requirement is traceability: an auditor should be able to follow any assay back to its batch, its controls and the decisions made about it. When validation, control charts and dispatch records live in one database rather than scattered spreadsheets, the audit report is generated from the same source the team works in every day. GeoMate’s audit and QAQC report builder produces exactly this — a JORC / NI 43-101-oriented document assembled from the live data, so the report reflects reality instead of a hand-curated snapshot.