Defend every billable hour.
You run equipment on someone else's mine. You bill by the hour, the tonne, or the task.
When your evidence is weaker than the mine's, you pay the difference. Darikoda gives you defendable hour-meter, fuel, and availability evidence. Captured at source.
You run equipment on someone else's mine. You bill by the hour, the tonne, or the task. When your evidence is weaker than the mine's, you pay the difference. Darikoda gives you defendable hour-meter, fuel, and availability evidence, captured at source.
Mining / Contractor
One record. Three acts. Scroll it.
The same operating record, morphing as you scroll: the gap you carry made visible, the control that closes it, then the record on the other side.
Disputed billable exposure this month
34 hrs
GHS 41,000
71%
82%
+38%
2 assets
Two hired excavators are billing above the owned-fleet benchmark and 34 hours this month carry no time-stamped evidence behind them.
Captured at source, not reconstructed at the desk.
The billable hour, the bowser litre, the availability the mine verifies, captured at the face when it happens, not rebuilt from memory when the QS arrives.
Where the evidence breaks
The six places a mining contractor loses money before the invoice is even drafted.
Defending billable hours.
Day-works billing means hours equal revenue. Hour-meter readings need to be captured at events the client can verify, not reconstructed at month-end. The QS who signs your invoice should be looking at the same record you do.
Fuel evidence at the mine's bowser.
The mine stores and dispenses. Your operator writes what was received. When your operator is absent at the event, the mine's number becomes the default. One of your largest cost lines, weakly evidenced at source.
Hired vs owned cost visibility.
A hired excavator at GHS 84K/month deserves a hard answer at renewal. Without per-asset operating cost against revenue, renew-or-replace is instinct, not decision.
Servicing delays and parts lead times.
Critical wear items from Tema with two-week lead times erase productive hours before the loss is visible in a month-end summary. Visibility on the workshop bottleneck moves the conversation forward.
Mechanical availability the client can verify.
Availability is your defence against client pressure. Without per-asset uptime evidence, the client's number wins the dispute.
Compliance the regulator can read.
Minerals Commission certification, safety reporting, insurance records. All of it needs a defendable record trail. The record is the evidence, not the explanation. As surface mining shifts to Ghanaian-owned contractors, the contractors who can evidence local content and clean field records are the ones the mines keep.
What changes between paper and structured
Three scenarios. Three places your record outranks theirs.
Your operator's log says 9 hours. The mine's QS log says 7. The QS asks for proof. You have a notebook entry with no timestamp, no GPS, no operator PIN. The 2-hour gap walks. At day-works rates, that is roughly USD 260 absorbed per machine on that single dispute. (Illustrative model, your number from the audit.)
M-04. Start 09:12, stop 18:23. Operator Kwame, PIN-attributed. GPS confirms the position throughout. 9.18 billable hours. The QS sees the same time-stamped record you do. The conversation happens with evidence rather than memory.
Pays for itself
Recover even part of what walks each month and the work pays for itself. Your audit sets the number for your fleet.
Your operator is on another machine when the fuel event happens. The mine writes 320L. Your monthly reconciliation shows the discrepancy three weeks later. The receipt is unsigned. You absorb the variance.
320L dispense, logged at the event by the operator on duty, with the pump reading and position captured as proof. If you challenge the number, you have the record. If you cannot, the gap is at least explicit rather than silent.
USD 5K / month
five percent recovery on a USD 100K monthly diesel spend, one line item. (Illustrative model, your number from the audit.)
The excavator costs GHS 84K/month to hire. Is it earning that back? The GM thinks yes. Finance thinks no. The renewal happens on instinct rather than evidence. Three months later it is obvious the wrong call was made.
Per-asset cost-per-tonne. 73% above the owned-fleet benchmark on the same route. The renewal conversation has a number behind it. Renew or replace becomes a decision rather than a feeling.
Per-asset visibility
renew-or-replace evidenced live, not reconstructed from three weeks of spreadsheet pulls.
Different scenarios. Same underlying gap. Same closing move.
Nine hours worked. Nine hours evidenced.
Start, stop and operator at the event, so the month-end count matches the work.
Built so your QS handover survives the cut.
Mining contractor workflows live or die on the integrity of the record at the moment the work happens. Six operational commitments make that record survive the trip from pit to cert.
- Every billable hour is saved on the spot and syncs when signal returns. Operators do not wait for 4G to log start, stop, or operator change.
- You can always see whether a fuel event has reached the office yet. No silent gaps between your record and the mine's reconciliation.
- Every action is attributed to a PIN-level operator, a machine, a contract, and a time. No reconstruction. No memory dispute.
- Shared tablets use PIN-level worker attribution. No one is logged in as someone else when the fuel event happens.
- Failed syncs at remote pit sites become visible issues, not silent gaps in the cert pack.
- Finance and the mine's QS see the same record. Your existing accounting or ERP gets fed the per-machine truth it cannot produce on its own.
Inside a typical month
What a Darikoda month actually looks like.
From operators capturing at the event in week one, to the cert pack landing as an export in week four. Concrete cadence, not theory.
Week 1
Operators capture at the event, not at the desk.
Hour-meter start, hour-meter stop, fuel dispense, fault report. Each entry PIN-attributed, GPS-confirmed, time-stamped. Saves locally first, syncs when signal returns. The first week is the discipline week.
Week 2
First patterns surface on the GM's phone.
Particular operator, particular machine, particular shift. The variance you suspected for months has a name.
Week 3
QS conversations shift.
When the mine's QS asks for proof on hours or fuel, you have it before they finish asking. Disputes resolve in minutes rather than days. The cert prep work disappears into the background.
Week 4
Month-end cert pack already half-built.
Hours, fuel, availability, faults. Structured per machine, per operator, per shift. The cert pack is an export, not a reconstruction. Two people for a day, not ten for a week.
Month 2 and beyond
Hire-rate and renewal decisions become evidence-led.
Per-asset cost-per-hour, cost-per-tonne where applicable. Hired vs owned comparison surfaces the asset bleeding margin. Renew, replace or retire becomes a decision the FD can defend.
A note from Theo
“The QS carries the measurement. The contractor stands between the two and absorbs whatever the gap reads.”
I spent four years at Caterpillar and Unatrac across Ghana and Nigeria heavy fleet operations. The pattern I saw most often on mining contractors was not that the work was not done. It was that the evidence at month-end was not structured enough to defend it. Operators carry the work. The QS carries the measurement. The contractor stands between the two and absorbs whatever the gap reads. The operating record is the layer that closes that gap. Hours captured at the event, fuel reconciled at the bowser, availability the mine can verify. The conversation with the QS becomes structured rather than adversarial. That is what we built.
Theo Ilori
Founder, Darikoda. UCL MSc Mechanical Engineering. Formerly GE precision turbines, Caterpillar/Unatrac Ghana & Nigeria.
Mining contractor FAQ.
The questions other Ghana mining contractors ask in the first call.
We run a 6-machine fleet on day-works. Is Darikoda overkill?
The question is not fleet size, it is dispute exposure. On day-works billing every contested hour and litre comes straight off your invoice. The Operational Audit produces the specific number for your operation.
Our operators sometimes miss the fuel event. What then?
The record makes the gap explicit. Operator absent, mine writes 320L, your record shows operator-absent at that event. The gap is documented, not lost. Over time the gaps narrow, because the missing-operator pattern becomes visible and addressable.
The mine uses its own fuel ledger. How do we reconcile?
Darikoda captures your version at the event, evidenced and attributed to the operator on duty. When the monthly reconciliation arrives from the mine, you have a structured record to compare against. Disputes happen with evidence, not without.
Does it replace Cat Product Link or KOMTRAX?
No. OEM telematics handle GPS, hour-meter telemetry, machine-health alerts. Darikoda is the operating record above that. The layer that ties the hours to the contract, the fuel to the invoice, the operator to the performance. We integrate where useful. We do not replace the OEM stack.
How long until we see results?
Fuel variance becomes visible from the first week of structured capture. The first month usually surfaces patterns (a particular operator, shift, or machine) that the GM did not have evidence for.
Does the December 2026 localisation push change anything for contractors?
It moves more surface-mining work to Ghanaian-owned contractors, blasting, loading and hauling included. The mines award and keep the contractors who can evidence the work and the local content cleanly. An operating record captured at the event is how you show both without a month of reconstruction.
From the Operating Notes
Field analysis that goes deeper on this.
- Mining · RegulatoryThe L.I. 2431 local-content return: an export if your record is clean, a scramble if it is not.
- Mining · RegulatoryGoldBod and traceability: the mine that can prove where every ounce came from wins.
- Fuel · Cross-verticalWhy fuel variance hides for three weeks, and what closes the gap at the bowser.
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Patterns described here are drawn from extensive field audits and industry research across Ghana's mining, construction, roadworks, and quarry sectors. No specific operator is named or identifiable.