Mining FAQ. The honest answers.
For the supervisor on a 12-week shutdown at South Flank. The fitter shop in Karratha that swings into Tom Price. The safety officer at a 120-person Perth contractor who's tired of losing the paperwork that proves the job was done right. Below: the questions we actually get, and what we actually answer.
14 days · no credit card · Windows + Linux today, macOS coming soon
Eleven categories. Out of the box.
Pick "Mining" at first launch and your filing tree is pre-built — same names every auditor in the Pilbara expects to see.
What you get on day one
- Pre-Start Inspections
- Permits to Work
- SWMS & JSEAs
- Isolations
- Inductions & Training
- Equipment Maintenance
- Daily Reports & Handovers
- Site Plans & Drawings
- Incidents & Near-Misses
- Audits & Non-Conformance
- Site Photos & Documentation
- Invoices & Purchase Orders (yes, that's twelve — the IPO bucket comes with the trades preset overlap)
Site IT, access, and install.
Section 1 — Will it run on this site at all?
Will it work on a Caterpillar/Komatsu site WiFi that blocks everything?
Yes — it runs offline. Stamping and reading both happen locally on the machine. The only outbound traffic is a licence-validation POST containing your licence key, machine ID, machine label, and app version — typically once on first launch and roughly weekly.
After that, a 7-day rolling offline grace period covers stand-down sites, fly camps, and any closed site WiFi. No outbound is required during normal operation. Watch the network-egress audit if you want to see every packet accounted for.
Can I use it on a fly-camp laptop without IT installing anything?
Yes — per-user install, no admin password. The installer writes into your user profile (%LOCALAPPDATA%\Matrix on Windows, ~/.local/share/Matrix on Linux). No services. No driver install. No registry changes outside your user hive.
Same way a portable app installs. If your laptop will let you install Spotify or Slack from your user account, it will let you install The Matrix.
What about FortiGate / EDR blocking unsigned binaries?
Honest answer: corporate AppLocker, EDR, or web-filter policies can still block per-user installs at some sites. We're not going to pretend otherwise. The installer is signed under our sole-trader name (ChunkLand, ABN 53 628 676 390); on Windows you may see a SmartScreen "More info → Run anyway" prompt on first run.
If your site uses a hard AppLocker allow-list, you'll need IT to add an exception or push it via your MDM. Standard MSI deploys fine through Intune or SCCM with per-user scope. Talk to IT, or use an admin-installed exception — we're not magic.
Does it work with my existing Brother / Canon / Konica Minolta MFD?
Yes. The Matrix uses the printer and scanner drivers your machine already has — it doesn't ship its own. Print through the OS print pipeline; scan-to-folder on the MFD into a watched directory; the reader watches that directory.
Tested across the common office MFD brands. Network-printed jobs work the same way as USB-attached ones. There's no proprietary print driver and no proprietary scanner integration — those are dependencies we deliberately don't take.
The audit-grade story.
Section 2 — When the auditor shows up
What happens to a SWMS that loses its stamp during a scan?
The unstamped page attaches to the previous stamped section. This is documented behaviour as of v0.2 — multi-page scans where only the first page carries a stamp will roll subsequent unstamped pages into the same document.
So a 5-page SWMS with a stamp on page 1 and signatures on pages 2–5 files as one document into the SWMS folder, not five fragments. Same goes for an isolation cert with a sign-on sheet stapled behind it, or a permit with a fire-watch close-out sheet.
Does the QR stamp survive a 200 DPI office MFD scan?
Yes — designed for it. The stamp is roughly 15 mm square in the top-right corner. It survives a fold, a coffee ring, a grease thumbprint, a photocopy, a fax, and a scan back at 200 DPI on the office MFC.
Doesn't survive being torn off — but if someone's tearing the corner off a SWMS, that's a different conversation.
What's the audit-grade story for a WHS Reg 2011 prosecution?
HMAC-SHA256 chain-of-custody on every printed page plus offline-only operation = the strongest defensible posture available off the shelf.
Each page carries a 16-byte HMAC-SHA256 signature derived from your licence key. Tampering, swapping, or back-dating a page breaks the signature on the next read — the page is flagged UNKNOWN and quarantined, never silently misfiled. Combined with a clean folder structure that maps to what an auditor expects to see, document production for a notifiable-incident investigation compresses by an order of magnitude. Defence cost on a serious investigation typically runs $50K–$300K, mostly in document production.
Not legal advice. ChunkLand is a sole trader (ABN 53 628 676 390) — your compliance posture is your responsibility.
Will the stamp give away worker names or site details if a page is photographed?
No. The 36-byte payload contains only licence_id, document_id_hash, page_num, category_id, and timestamp — XOR-scrambled with your licence key, then HMAC-SHA256 signed.
There is no worker name, no site name, no document title, and no project number in the stamp itself. If a page ends up photographed and posted on LinkedIn, the barcode reveals nothing about the underlying job.
Can the principal demand to see our barcoded pages?
Yes — the barcode is on the page, it's not hidden. If the principal wants to see how you're filing, you can show them the system. Some principals like it (signed audit trail, shorter document-production exchanges). Some are indifferent. None we've spoken to have objected.
The barcode contains no commercially sensitive information about your job — see the question above.
Workflow on a real site.
Section 3 — How it slots into the day
Can it handle the eleven-category mining preset out of the box?
Yes — pick Mining at first launch and the categories are pre-configured: Pre-Start Inspections, Permits to Work, SWMS & JSEAs, Isolations, Inductions & Training, Equipment Maintenance, Daily Reports & Handovers, Site Plans & Drawings, Incidents & Near-Misses, Audits & Non-Conformance, Site Photos & Documentation.
Categories live in a local JSON file (industry_presets.json). You can rename them, add a 12th, change the colour coding. The category map never gets transmitted off the machine.
What about HV switching certs that get printed on triplicate carbon paper?
The stamp prints on the top copy you put through the desktop printer. The two carbon copies don't carry the stamp — they're carbon copies, not separate prints. When the principal keeps a copy and you keep one, the one in your shed has the stamp; the principal's copy is unstamped paper as it always was.
If you need stamped duplicates for both parties, run the page through twice or use the print-multiple-copies dialog so each output gets its own stamp. Each sheet then carries an independent signature.
What if the supervisor forgets to print through The Matrix?
The page won't have a barcode. When it's scanned back, the reader flags it UNKNOWN and parks it in a quarantine folder for someone to file by hand.
The fix is operational, not technical — set The Matrix as the default print path on the office machines so it's the path of least resistance. Most shops do this on day one. Once it's the default, you'd have to actively choose not to use it.
Does it integrate with Pegasus, INX InControl, Cintellate, or Velocity Global EHS?
No — and we're not pretending otherwise. The Matrix is the contractor-side filing layer for the physical paperwork that exists alongside those platforms.
The principal's structured data still lives in their EHS system. The original signed paper now lives in folders the auditor expects to see — Permits to Work, SWMS & JSEAs, Isolations, and so on. Most customers run both. The two solve different problems.
Can it talk to SharePoint, OneDrive, or our DMS?
Not directly via any integration. It writes to a local folder. If that folder is sync'd to SharePoint by your existing sync client, the files end up in SharePoint — but that's your sync client doing the work, not us.
We're not promising IMAP, M365, or SharePoint connectors today. v0.2 is filesystem-in, filesystem-out.
Pricing, backup, and what happens if we vanish.
Section 4 — Money and risk
How does pricing work for a 30-person crew?
Two honest options:
Six × Starter at A$29/mo each = A$174/mo total. Gives you 6 named seats — typically the supervisors, the safety officer, and the practice manager. The crew prints through whoever's machine they're at. Cheapest option for a shop where the trades don't print their own paperwork.
Business tier at A$299/mo for 20 seats. Covers most of a 30-person crew but you'd still be 10 short of a full deployment. There's no 30-seat tier today; talk to us if you need one and we'll work something out.
No per-document fee. No per-page fee. No AI-tokens meter. Stamp 50,000 pages a month or 500 — the price is the price.
What if my office burns down or my laptop gets stolen?
The pages live on your disk. Back them up the same way you back up everything else — site server, NAS, off-site sync, whatever you already do. The Matrix doesn't impose a backup model.
Your folders are folders — regular PDFs in regular directories. If you lose the laptop, your stamped originals are wherever your backup is.
What if my licence expires or ChunkLand goes bust?
Your stamped pages stay readable forever — they're regular PDFs in regular folders on your disk. The reader just won't validate new pages without a licence.
Worst case (we vanish), a future release would unlock with an offline-permanent licence, and your existing files were never on our infrastructure to begin with. There is no vendor lock-in because there's no vendor data path to lock you into.
Do you have SOC 2 or ISO 27001 for procurement?
Not today. We're a sole trader (ABN 53 628 676 390); enterprise audits cost $50K+ and we'd rather pass the cost on transparently than bake it into prices for crews who don't need it.
If your procurement template hard-requires SOC 2 or ISO 27001, we're not your vendor today. For contracts at A$25K+ ARR we're open to procurement-funded certification — happy to talk specifics. Below that, the security page and the signed attestation letter are the documents your reviewer needs.
Try it on a swing's worth of paperwork.
14-day trial, no credit card, mining preset out of the box. Stamp a real shift's worth of pre-starts, permits and SWMS, scan it back, watch every page land in the right folder.