BC Mineral Claim Expiry Dates: How to Track Good-to-Dates and Get Reminders
To track BC mineral claim good-to-dates, open Tenure Monitor in Exploration Maps, search by tenure number or registered owner, add the claims to a portfolio, and set reminder thresholds. Reminders are emailed at 90, 30 and 1 day before each good-to-date, and the portfolio flags claims whose government record has changed. Exploration Maps is not the official registry and does not file work or pay cash in lieu — confirm every deadline in BC Mineral Titles Online before acting on it.
The problem with the spreadsheet
Most junior explorers track good-to-dates in a spreadsheet somebody built years ago. It works until one of four things happens: the person who maintained it leaves, a good-to-date moves and nobody re-enters it, a claim is transferred and the row goes stale, or the reminder was a calendar entry that got dismissed on a busy morning. Every one of those is a normal week at a small company, and the cost of the failure is not a missed meeting — it is ground.
What a good-to-date is
The good-to-date is the date by which a British Columbia mineral claim must be maintained to stay in good standing. Maintenance means recorded assessment work, or a cash payment in lieu of work, filed through Mineral Titles Online. Miss it and the claim can forfeit, and the ground becomes open.
It is published as a date, not a timestamp, and Exploration Maps treats it that way — days remaining are counted in Pacific time, because a British Columbia deadline is a British Columbia deadline wherever you are reading from. Checking your claims at breakfast in London still shows you the province's date.
What moves a good-to-date
All of those happen in MTO. The consequence for tracking is that a good-to-date is not a fixed annual date you can put in a calendar once — it moves, and a spreadsheet only knows it moved if somebody re-enters it. When the province moves a date, monitored reminders are recalculated automatically and the outdated ones are cancelled.
- Registering a statement of work, which pushes the date forward by the value of work recorded
- Paying cash in lieu of assessment work
- Certain title transactions, which can change the date on the resulting tenure
What Tenure Monitor does
It keeps a saved list of B.C. tenures, reads their published good-to-dates from the province's public dataset, counts the days in Pacific time, emails you before each deadline, and tells you when the government record for one of your claims changes.
- Search by tenure number, a pasted list of numbers, registered owner, client number, map extent, or an uploaded CSV
- Reminders at 90, 30 and 1 day before each good-to-date — 7 days as well on Pro
- Change detection: good-to-date moved, owner added or removed, status changed, boundary or area changed
- A record of what you decided about each claim, and when
- One click to open any claim in the map editor
- CSV export of the whole claim schedule
Step 1: Add your claims
Open Tenure Monitor and choose Add claims. If you know your tenure numbers, paste the whole list at once. If you don't, search by registered owner — type the company name and you get back candidates grouped by how confident the match is, with the claim count and total hectares as you select them. Nothing is added until you confirm it.
Owner names reach the registry in clipped legal form, so the search ranks candidates rather than deciding for you. That is deliberate: adding somebody else's title to your portfolio would put a deadline you don't own on your dashboard, and quietly drop the one you do.
Step 2: Set when you want to be reminded
Reminders are counted back from each claim's good-to-date in Pacific time, because a B.C. deadline is a B.C. deadline wherever you happen to be reading from. Pick the thresholds you want and add the people who should receive them.
Step 3: Record what you decided
Against each claim you can record a maintenance decision — intend to maintain, intend to allow lapse, maintenance completed, needs verification — plus an internal project name, a note, and a reference number for after you file in MTO yourself. Every change is logged with who made it and when.
This is the part that matters eighteen months later, when somebody asks why a claim was allowed to lapse. The activity log is written automatically and can't be edited from the screen that made the change.
Step 4: Watch what changed
After each government data import, the portfolio compares what the province now publishes against what it held before. Material changes — a title terminated, an owner added or removed, a good-to-date pulled earlier, a claim that has stopped appearing in the dataset — are lifted to the top of the activity view rather than buried in a date-ordered feed alongside a boundary tweak.
Applications are marked as applications
The B.C. dataset publishes applications in the same feed as granted titles, with the same columns — around 2,500 of them at the time of writing. Anything the province publishes as an application carries an Application tag in the table, in search results, on the claim panel, and in the reminder email.
This matters because an application is not held ground. The date on one comes from the same government column as a granted claim's good-to-date, but it is not a confirmed maintenance deadline, and treating it as one invites somebody to spend money defending ground that hasn't been granted. The dataset publishes no application status, stage or expected decision date, so Tenure Monitor shows none of those — guessing about where a title application stands is not something you should be reading off a map product.
You can watch ground you don't own
A portfolio is a watch list, not an ownership record. You can monitor any registered B.C. title — a competitor's ground, a property you're evaluating, a block adjacent to your own — using the same portfolios and reminders as your own claims. Search by registered owner, select the titles, add them. Nothing about doing so is visible to the title holder, and nothing about it changes the title.
What it deliberately does not do
Tenure Monitor is read-only with respect to government transactions. It reads public data, calculates dates, sends reminders, records what you decided, and links you to MTO.
- It does not log into MTO for you, and never stores MTO credentials
- It does not file assessment work or pay cash in lieu
- It does not register, transfer or acquire title
- It does not automatically stake released ground
- A reminder from Exploration Maps is not a legal notice from the province
Where the data comes from
What it costs
| Free | Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Monitored B.C. tenures | 10 | 50 |
| Portfolios | 1 | Several |
| Reminder thresholds | 90, 30, 1 days | 90, 30, 7, 1 days |
| Reminder recipients | 1 | 2 |
| Claim table, portfolio map, CSV export | Yes | Yes |
| Open claims in the map editor | Yes | Yes |
| Clean high-resolution map exports | — | Yes |