Field guide · Documentation
How CoreTrack works
Learn how CoreTrack tracks core processing from drilling to dispatch — and how to shape the workflow around your core yard.
Getting started
What is CoreTrack?
CoreTrack is a digital core tracking solution designed for core yard teams — geologists, technicians and supervisors alike. It replaces traditional whiteboards with a real-time tracking system providing comprehensive audit trails, team collaboration, and workflows you can configure to match exactly how your yard operates.
Key benefits
- Real-time tracking of every hole and processing step
- Configurable workflows — phases, steps and activation rules that mirror your process
- Comprehensive audit trail for compliance and review
- Analytics recaps of drilling and logging productivity
- Mobile-friendly access from the field or the office
Your first hole
From the Active Holes dashboard, click Add Hole and enter the hole id, project, location, planned depth, priority and start date. Pick a workflow (your default is preselected) and toggle any optional steps on or off. Once saved, record drilled depth as work progresses — steps activate automatically according to the workflow's rules.
Starting a program with dozens of planned holes? Use Import instead and create them all from your drill-plan spreadsheet — see Importing a drill plan.
The life of a hole
A hole's stage on the dashboard is derived from its progress — it always reflects the earliest work still outstanding, so a hole can never jump ahead of itself.
-
Pending
The hole has been created but no drilling has been recorded yet.
-
Drill / Markup
Drilling is underway. Record drilled depth from the progress dialog; steps configured to activate at hole start (such as Orientation and Meter Mark in the standard workflow) become available. The hole stays in this stage until drilling is flagged complete.
-
Workflow phases
The hole moves through the phases of its workflow — for the standard workflow: Markup, Logging, Photography, Cutting, Sampling and Dispatch. The current stage is the phase of the earliest incomplete step, whether required or optional, so an outstanding optional step holds its phase until it is completed or removed from the hole.
-
Completed
All steps are done and the hole is marked complete, moving it to the Completed Holes register. Administrators can also complete a hole early — for example when drilling is abandoned short of planned depth.
Configurable workflows
Every team processes core differently — some photograph before logging, some skip cutting entirely. The Configuration page lets administrators design workflow templates that control the step sequence, phase groupings and activation rules for holes. Every tenant starts with the Standard Core Logging workflow, which you can tailor or use as the basis for your own.
- Phases group related steps and become the stages shown on the dashboard. Add, rename, reorder and pick an icon for each phase.
- Steps are dragged from the Available Steps palette into phases and reordered freely. Mark each step Required or optional — optional steps can be toggled per hole.
- Activation rules decide when a step becomes available: either when the hole starts drilling, or when another step is started or completed. Multiple rules on a step mean any one of them activates it. Optional steps left off a hole are skipped transparently — their dependants activate as if they had run.
- The default workflow is preselected when creating a new hole, but any workflow can be chosen at creation time.
- Validation on save guarantees every workflow can run to completion — no unreachable steps, circular rules, duplicate phases or empty configurations.
Workflows by plan
- Basic
- Standard workflow (read-only)
- Professional
- Up to 2 workflows
- Enterprise
- Unlimited workflows
Workflows in use by active holes are protected — steps and phases cannot be removed, new required steps added, or activation rules changed until those holes complete. Use Copy to restructure a live workflow safely, then set the copy as your default.
A workflow cannot be deleted while it is the default or while active holes are using it.
Working offline
Core yards rarely have reliable signal, so CoreTrack keeps working without one. Sign in once with a connection and the app resumes your session offline from then on — the dashboard stays available, and the field work you record is saved on your device and synced automatically the moment the connection returns.
- Record as normal — drill progress, step updates, hole completions and new holes all work offline. A hole created offline shows an Awaiting sync badge (its details can still be edited) until it reaches the server.
- Watch the cloud icon in the top bar: it shows when you're offline, how many changes are waiting, and when syncing is under way. Everything drains automatically on reconnect — no button to remember.
- Review, never lose — if the server can't accept a change at sync time (for example a teammate created the same hole ID while you were offline), it's kept in the Offline Changes list with the reason. Fix and retry it, or discard it; later changes to the same hole wait until you decide.
- Fully audited — synced changes land in the audit trail with your name, exactly as if you'd been connected.
Available offline
- Dashboard, hole cards and progress entry
- Creating and completing holes
- Completed holes and recent audit history (view)
Needs a connection
- First sign-in and switching organisations
- Administration — settings, users, workflows, libraries, billing
- Analytics (views you opened online stay readable)
On shared yard devices, sign out when you finish — signing out clears the data and any unsynced work stored on the device (you'll be warned first if changes are still waiting).
Explore CoreTrack
Active Holes
The dashboard groups holes by stage with live counts and drilled metres per stage. Search across holes, filter Active versus Pending, update drilling progress and steps, adjust planned depth, and add holes. Completing, deleting and importing holes are administrator actions. Switch to the Yard Board to see every hole against every process step at once — each cell stamped with when it was last updated, and holes sortable so the ones nobody has touched come first — or the Wall Board for a full-screen, auto-cycling display built for the core shed wall.
Completed Holes
A searchable register of every finished hole with type, project, location, dates, and drilled versus planned depth. Expand a row to review the steps recorded against it.
Audit Trail
Every change is recorded automatically with who, what and when — down to individual property values. Filter by date range, hole, operation or user, and expand a hole to see its full activity history.
Libraries
Maintain the reference data used across your operation — Locations, Projects, Rigs, Bag Series and Hole Types — so hole records stay consistent and reportable. Every entry has a required full description and can have an optional short code; the two share one unambiguous namespace within that library.
Analytics
Production charts over 24 hours, a week, a month, 6 months or a year — metres drilled, marked, logged and cut, plotted per hole, per day or per month. Review any past day or week, compare swings side by side, and watch the backlog overlay for steps falling behind. Totals measure work done in the period, so logging can exceed drilling while a backlog is cleared. Switch to cycle-time analysis for phase durations and stuck holes.
Reports
Printable records built from the progress your crew already logs, on your organisation's letterhead. The Daily Yard Report covers a day — metres, what moved, where the board stood at the end of it, what needs attention and the notes left behind; reprint an earlier day and the board shows how it looked then. The Production Report rolls up a week or swing with splits by rig and project and the backlog's movement. The Hole Progress Report follows one hole collar to dispatch, step by step, for handing over with the core. The Shift Handover sheet is the wall board as paper for the crew coming on. Print any of them as a page-numbered PDF, or export the figures to CSV.
Configuration
Design the workflow templates that drive your holes — phases, step ordering, required flags and activation rules — with a visual drag-and-drop designer.
Settings
Manage organisations and switch between them, and invite users and set their roles. Administrators can also configure site settings: the reporting week start day, swing roster labels, and the site timezone used for analytics.
Importing a drill plan
At the start of a program the drill plan usually already exists — as a spreadsheet, or as an export from your drillhole database. Rather than retyping it, administrators can create every hole at once from a CSV file using Import, next to Add Hole on the Active Holes dashboard.
How it works
- Choose your CSV file. Only the first row needs to be a header.
- Check the Columns panel. CoreTrack matches your headers automatically, and every match is a dropdown you can change — so your column names never have to match ours.
- Review the preview. Every row is checked before anything is created.
- Untick any rows you don't want, then import.
Nothing is saved until you press Import, and the whole file is created in a single operation — so an import either lands or it doesn't. There is no half-imported drill plan to clean up.
What each row can carry
Only Hole ID is required. Everything else is optional and can be left out of the file entirely.
- Hole ID — up to 50 characters, must be unique
- Planned Depth — in metres
- Collar Depth — in metres; leave the cell empty for a hole that hasn't been collared yet
- Project, Location, Rig — an existing code or full description is accepted; a value matching neither is created as a new description
- Hole Type — must match an existing Hole Type code or full description; it is never created from the file
- Priority — Low, Medium or High
- Start Date — use YYYY-MM-DD to avoid any ambiguity
- Notes — free text
Download the template from the import dialog for a file with these headers already in place.
Reading the preview
Each row is given a status. Only Ready rows can be imported — the rest are shown so you can see what was skipped and why, rather than discovering it afterwards.
Ready
The row is valid and will be created.
Already exists
A hole with this ID is already in CoreTrack. Import never overwrites an existing hole.
Repeated in file
The same hole ID appears earlier in the file. The first one is imported; later copies are not.
Invalid
Something in the row could not be read — a missing hole ID, or a depth or date that isn't a valid value. The message explains which.
New library entries are listed first
Project, location and rig values first match an existing code or full description. Anything matching neither is shown before you import, so a typo is caught before it becomes a permanent library entry. If a legacy code and description conflict, the row is rejected rather than choosing one.
Imported holes start as Pending
They carry your default workflow with every step waiting. Recording drilled depth starts a hole and activates its first steps, exactly as if it had been added by hand.
Processing steps reference
These are the processing steps available to every workflow. The grouping and activation described below follows the Standard Core Logging workflow — your own workflows can arrange and trigger these steps however suits your yard.
Markup
Orientation · Meter Mark
- Orientation:
- Orientation line marking on the recovered core.
- Meter Mark:
- Marking depth measurements along the core.
Standard activation
Both activate as soon as drilling starts (drilled depth is recorded). Meter Mark is required;
Orientation is optional.
Logging
RQD · Recovery · Mag Sus · Geo Log · GTL
- RQD:
- Rock Quality Designation assessment.
- Recovery:
- Percentage of core recovered.
- Magnetic Susceptibility:
- Magnetic properties measurement.
- Geological Log:
- Detailed geological description.
- Geotechnical Log:
- Engineering-focused record of core condition and discontinuities.
Standard activation
When Meter Mark is started. Geological Log is required; GTL and the other Logging steps are optional.
Photography
Specific Gravity · Core Photography
- Specific Gravity:
- Density measurement.
- Core Photography:
- Visual documentation of the core trays.
Standard activation
When the Geological Log is started. Teams that photograph before logging simply move Photography
earlier in their workflow and trigger it from Meter Mark instead.
Final Processing
Cut · Sample · Dispatch
- Cut:
- Physical cutting of the core.
- Sample:
- Preparation of samples for analysis.
- Dispatch:
- Final packaging and shipping.
Standard activation
Cut follows Core Photography; Sample and Dispatch follow Cut. If the optional Cut step is left
off a hole, Sample and Dispatch activate in its place automatically.
Knowing what is current
A board that shows what has been done, without showing when, hides the thing a supervisor most needs to see: work that has quietly stopped moving. On the Yard Board every step and the drilled depth carry their own last-updated stamp, so a hole that looks busy but has not been touched in a week reads as exactly that.
Every cell keeps its own date
Each step shows when it was last recorded — TODAY, YDAY, or the date itself for anything older, because “3 days ago” makes you work out which shift that was. Drilled depth carries a separate stamp under the depth bar. Recording metres this morning does not make Markup and Logging look current — they still show the day they were actually last touched.
A count of what is behind
Beside a hole ID, a number counts the steps that are open and have not been updated today. Steps that opened today are not counted — entering metres can open several new steps at once, and doing the morning’s work should never make a hole look worse. A step with no stamp at all is one nobody has recorded anything against yet.
The morning sweep, in order
Sort the Yard Board by Needs review to put the holes with the most un-updated steps at the top. It is deliberately not a plain “least recently changed” order, which would promote a hole because someone edited its project name rather than because the core stopped moving.
Days are the yard’s days. Freshness is worked out in calendar days at the site, using the Site Timezone set under Settings — so a supervisor in one city reading a board in another still sees the crew’s day, and work recorded at 11pm reads as yesterday to the crew who arrive at 7am rather than as eight hours old. A wall display left running rolls the dates over on its own at the yard’s midnight.
Classifying holes
Hole Types are your own list, kept under Libraries → Hole Types beside Locations, Projects, Rigs and Bag Series. A new site starts with an empty list, ready for the classifications its program actually uses. Every hole can carry one, and none has to — the type is optional and correctable at any point.
Maintained like any library
Add, rename and remove types from the same grid as the rest of your reference data. An optional code gives a compact Yard Board label while the description keeps the full name. Renaming one updates it everywhere, on past holes as well as new.
Removing one in use
Deleting a type leaves the holes that carried it with no type at all — the same as deleting a project or a location that is still referenced. If those holes still need to read correctly, rename the type instead, or wait until they are finished with.
Importing
A Hole Type column has to match a type's optional code or full description — spelling and capitalisation aside. Unlike Project, Location and Rig it is never created from the file: the preview flags the line so you can fix the spelling or add the type first, rather than a typo splitting your program across two names that mean the same thing.
If you upgraded from an earlier version, your holes keep exactly the type they were recorded under. Only the legacy values actually used by holes are added, with their familiar RD, EXP or GC code.
When a type has a code, exports write that compact value and imports accept either the code or the full description. Existing files containing RD, EXP or GC therefore continue to preview and import without being rewritten.
Best practices
Model your real process
Configure your workflow to match how your yard actually operates instead of entering placeholder data to unlock steps. If a step happens earlier for your team, move it earlier in the workflow.
Update progress regularly
Record drilled depth and step values as work happens. The dashboard, stage derivation and analytics are only as current as the data entered. The Yard Board makes the gaps visible: each step carries the date it was last recorded, and a hole shows how many of its open steps have not been updated today.
Complete or remove optional steps
An incomplete optional step holds its hole in that phase. If an optional step turns out not to be needed, remove it from the hole so the stage moves on accurately.
Field guides
The stages of core processing, where whiteboards and spreadsheets break down, the habits that prevent backlogs, and a self-audit checklist for your yard.
An honest comparison of tracking drill core in a spreadsheet versus purpose-built software — what each does well, where each breaks down, and how to decide.
Need additional help?
Check out our Help Center for FAQs, troubleshooting guides and answers to common questions.
Visit Help Center