Finance Data-Lineage Architect — Diversified Mining

The mandate

Tonnes, grade, recovery, shipments, provisional sales, treatment charges, royalties and inventory move through mine, laboratory, logistics, marketing and finance systems with different identifiers and cut-offs. Consolidation introduces equity-accounted ventures, functional-currency changes and manual eliminations. Report owners can explain a final measure but cannot reproduce the full source history or identify which transformation altered economic meaning.

The six-month deliverable is a source-to-report financial lineage architecture for production-linked revenue, cost of sales, inventory, royalties, capital expenditure, segment results and selected non-statutory measures. It must define business events, authoritative fields, transformations, controls, adjustments and accountable interpretation, while distinguishing physical measurement, commercial estimate, accounting policy and management metric.

Milestone one at week four accepts the critical-report and source inventory; week ten approves canonical events and ownership; week eighteen completes three mine-to-group reproductions; and week twenty-six accepts lineage artefacts, control requirements, data-quality contracts and implementation backlog. Fees follow acceptance only after client analysts reproduce selected figures without consultant queries or private mappings.

Acceptance requires Mine Finance and Group Reporting to trace ten unseen transactions across production, sale, provisional price, royalty, inventory and consolidation; reproduce three executive measures; and explain every manual adjustment by owner and policy. Internal Audit must reperform selected paths. Data gaps remain qualified and prioritised, not filled through undocumented assumptions or visually persuasive dashboards.

The client will provide operational models, laboratory and production data, shipment and sales records, contracts, royalty terms, inventory movements, entity ledgers, consolidation journals, reporting definitions, data models and named owners. The consultant does not verify mineral reserves, certify production, set accounting policy, post entries, rebuild platforms, define investor measures or issue assurance.

Why this is external work

Each mine and function owns a valid local truth, while central data teams understand transformations but not every financial judgement. Prior lineage projects stopped at technical tables. Independent architecture can connect business events and policy meaning across those boundaries without becoming the source owner, accountant, mine certifier or platform implementer.

What you will own

• Prioritise financial measures by board consequence, judgement, manual adjustment, data fragility and cross-system dependency.
• Map production, assay, inventory, shipment, pricing, royalty, cost, capital and entity events to canonical identifiers.
• Trace source fields through transformations, interfaces, journals, eliminations, allocations and reported measures.
• Define ownership for physical measurement, commercial estimate, accounting judgement, management adjustment and technical data control.
• Rehearse unseen provisional-price, inventory transfer, venture elimination, royalty and functional-currency events.
• Establish data-quality contracts, exception tolerances, change impact, lineage evidence, access and control monitoring across legal entities.
• Deliver event models, report lineage, adjustment register, ownership, control requirements, training cases and implementation backlog.

Candidate qualifications

• Led finance data-lineage architecture in mining, energy or another operationally complex commodity group.
• Connected production, logistics and commercial events to ledgers, consolidation, segments and management measures.
• Preserved physical, commercial, accounting and reporting meanings through technical transformation and manual adjustment.
• Challenged dashboards whose apparent reconciliation concealed changed populations, timing or policy definitions.
• Worked with mine operators, controllers, marketers, tax, data engineers, Internal Audit and external auditors.
• Transferred lineage through independent report reproduction under controlled client governance rather than leaving static diagrams or consultant-owned queries.

Non-negotiables

• Can complete five mine or marketing residencies and all three report-reproduction workshops within six months.
• Will disclose relationships with miners, joint ventures, traders, data platforms, auditors and systems integrators.
• Brings business-event-to-report mining lineage; technical data-catalogue work alone is insufficient.
• Will not certify reserves or production, choose policy, post entries, rebuild platforms or define investor measures.

1. 49 words maximum. Describe a mining measure whose meaning changed during an apparently correct data transformation.
2. 49 words maximum. Which provisional-price or venture event would you use to test source-to-report lineage?
3. 49 words maximum. What client artefacts are essential before a manual adjustment can be traced?