What's New in LeaseCTRL2: Ask Your Tenure Data a Question, and Check It Against the Register

Most tenure work is not complicated. It is relentless.

Rent falls due whether or not the expenditure report is finished. The register changes whether or not anyone tells you. And the answer to “How many tenements expire in the next 90 days?” is always sitting in your data somewhere, usually behind three filters and an export to Excel.

I did this job before I helped build software for it, and the pattern was the same then as it is now. The parts that actually mattered, the judgement calls, the relationship with the department, knowing why a condition was worded the way it was, were never the parts that ate the day. The day went on checking, re-checking and re-typing.

That is the thinking behind 2.0.0.3, the latest release on from 2.0.0.2. Less about bolting on features, more about shortening the distance between you and an answer.

Ask the grid a question

The headline addition is the AI Grid Toolkit, available on Enterprise plans. Every data grid in LeaseCTRL2 now has a chat window attached to it, and you can ask it things the way you would ask a colleague.

“Show me all overdue actions in WA.” The grid filters itself.

“Chart expenditure by tenure.” The chart appears inline.

“Summarise the tenements expiring this quarter and put it in a report.” You get a Word document.

There is no query builder to learn and no syntax to memorise. If you can describe what you want, you can get it. That matters more than it sounds, because the people who need portfolio answers fastest are usually the ones least likely to sit through training on a tenement tracking system.

Two things worth saying plainly about this. The AI is working on your data, inside your database, and it shows you the filter it applied so you can check its work. And it does not make decisions. It fetches, filters, summarises and drafts. You still decide.

The audit that used to take a fortnight

If the AI toolkit is the feature people notice first, the GLMS audit tool is the one I expect they will use most.

Reconciling your own records against the government register is the least glamorous job in mining compliance automation, and one of the most important. Do it and it is invisible. Skip it and it eventually costs you money, or ground.

The audit tool imports the government data and puts it beside yours, with every difference highlighted. From there you choose what to accept. Apply changes one at a time, or in bulk, with a full audit trail of what was changed and when.

A few details that came out of the way this actually gets done in practice:

• Rent is matched by period rather than by list position, so advance payments stop generating false differences.
• Tenures that vanish from the register are flagged for investigation rather than silently disappearing from your reconciliation.
• Pending actions are surfaced alongside matching imported data, so a completion is one click instead of a separate hunt.
• Fields or entire tenures you do not care about can be ignored in future audits, which keeps the noise down and the real differences visible.
• Conditions and endorsements are compared alongside the core tenure data.

It currently supports Australia/Canada and a smattering of other jurisdictions around the globe that have public datasets, such as Alaska and New Zealand. Given that Western Australia has quite a big repository of data, there are far more available audit capabilities, and as country data becomes more digital, we can evolve to audit that too.

A landing page that tells you something

Opening LeaseCTRL2 now puts you on a dashboard rather than a list. Active tenures, upcoming and overdue actions, and expiring tenures sit across the top as KPI cards. Below that is a colour coded map, with status shown on the polygons themselves, so a problem in a project 900 kilometres away is visible before anyone rings you about it.

There is also an AI daily briefing, which is a short-written summary of what changed and what needs attention. It is the thing I would have wanted at 7am with a coffee, before anyone else got in.

The quieter improvements

The features that save the most time are rarely the ones that demo well.

Saved grid views let you keep your column layout, filters and sort order, then load them instantly. Keep them to yourself or share them with the team, which is how a new starter inherits a working setup instead of building one.

Bulk actions let you select multiple actions and complete them, or mark them awaiting update, in one go. Anyone who has clicked through fifty near identical items one at a time will understand why this exists.

Custom field formulas let you create calculated columns without being a developer. Write JavaScript if that is your thing or describe the calculation in plain English and let the AI write the formula for you.

Group report summaries pull combined expenditure, an interactive map and aggregated data across every tenure in a group, with an AI written portfolio summary on top.

And for anyone starting out, there is a guided tour function to help you populate your database via the GLMS Import, plus a rebuilt configuration page that uses tiles and breadcrumbs instead of the old tree sidebar.

What this is not

I am wary of overselling AI in land management, mostly because I have watched the industry get sold things before.

None of this replaces a tenement manager. It cannot ring the department and read the room. It cannot tell you which regional office prefers which approach, or what happened to that ground in the nineties. It has no opinion on risk and no accountability when something goes wrong, and accountability is the whole job.

What it does is take the mechanical work off your plate. The filtering, the cross checking, the retyping, the first draft of the report. That is time you get back for the work only you can do.

For exploration permit management and mineral rights compliance, the risk was never that people stopped caring. It is that portfolios grew faster than the tools did, and the checking became something you fit in around everything else. Software should carry that load.

See it in action

We are running a live walkthrough of everything in this release, including full demos of the AI Grid Toolkit and the GLMS audit tool, on 23 September. It is free for all LeaseCTRL2 clients.

If you are not on LeaseCTRL2 yet and you want to see what tenure management software looks like when it is built by people who have done the job, book a demo or start a free trial at leasectrl.com.