Choosing an oil & gas bookkeeping service? Six checks for operators and non-op working interest owners — well-level coding, JIB fluency, and real automation.
At some point every operator outgrows the founder-does-the-books era. Invoices are stacking up, JIBs need to go out, the bank wants clean financials, and the choice lands on the table: hire in-house, outsource to a bookkeeping service, or put software at the center and keep a lean team around it.
The wrong choice is expensive in a way that doesn’t show up on any invoice. Books that reconcile but can’t answer “what did that well cost us last year?” are books you’ll eventually pay someone to redo. This matters double if you hold non-operated interests — you need a service that can decode other operators’ JIBs, not just book your own AP.
Don’t hire a bookkeeper and hope they learn oil & gas. Hire for oil & gas and let the software do the bookkeeping.
Whoever you’re evaluating — a local firm, a national outsourcer, or a software-led service — run them through these six checks.
Hand them a real JIB and a purchaser revenue statement and ask how they’d book each. If the answer doesn’t mention wells, deducts, or interest types, keep looking. If you’re non-op, make it a JIB from one of your operators — that’s the document they’ll live in.
Ask to see a sample lease operating statement from their work. If costs and revenue aren’t tracked by well and AFE, you’re buying a bank reconciliation, not oil & gas accounting.
Whether you run QuickBooks or industry software, the service should work inside your system — not trap your data in theirs. Ask what happens to your books if you leave.
“AI-powered” sometimes means people retyping PDFs overnight. Ask to watch an invoice go from inbox to coded entry. If they can’t show you, it’s not automation.
Get specific: how fast is an invoice available for approval? When does the month close? Vague answers now become missed deadlines in busy season.
Every entry should trace back to a source document, and approvals should be enforced by the system — not by memory. Your bank and your partners will eventually ask.
A great O&G accountant is worth every dollar, but one person doing manual entry is a bottleneck, a key-person risk, and usually the most overqualified data-entry clerk in the county.
You send documents into a queue and financials come back. When something looks off, the answer is days away — and the well-level detail often never existed.
AI handles capture, coding, and routing; your team (or a fractional accountant) reviews and approves. You keep the visibility of in-house at a fraction of the manual work.
Every option will demo well on their own sample data. The only test that matters is yours: send whoever you’re evaluating a week of real invoices, one JIB, and one revenue statement, and judge what comes back. How fast, how accurate, how much detail survived — and how much of your team’s time it took.
That one exercise will tell you more than any reference call.
Joltly is an AI-powered bookkeeping service built for oil and gas operators — well-level coding, JIB and revenue statement handling, inside the accounting system you already use. Start with a free books assessment: send us your documents and grade the result yourself.
Get quick answers to common queries in our FAQs.
You only pay for what you use — no seat fees and no modules you don't need. Pricing is a monthly platform fee plus usage on documents processed, ACH payments, mailed checks, and the workflows you turn on. We size it to your actual monthly close so it scales with the work, not your headcount.
A smaller operator running 25 documents, 10 ACH payments, and 2 mailed checks a month would be priced on that exact volume. A larger operator at 100 documents, 50 ACH payments, and 10 checks pays predictably more. You always know what you're spending because it tracks the actual close.
Joltly connects directly to QuickBooks and Quorum On-Demand Accounting, and supports file-based export workflows for systems like PakEnergy and Integra. It manages accounts, items, vendors, partner mappings, JIB clearing, revenue liabilities, and netting accounts inside your existing setup.
Both sides of settlement. On expenses: invoice review, GL coding, approvals, JIB creation, ACH and check payments. On revenue: statement OCR, partner distributions, remittance emails, and netting between JIB receivables and revenue payouts — so your team replaces spreadsheet work and email follow-up during close.
Yes. Your wells, partners, revenue interests, GL mappings, approval flow, export formats, and partner-facing statements are configured per operator. Most customers go live on their existing chart of accounts and ERP setup — no rebuild required.
Faster than most teams expect. Your AP workflow can be live in less than a week — and you don't need to change your current accounting system. Revenue typically takes about two weeks. The only thing we need from you is a sample revenue statement so we can train the AI on your format.
We set up a Microsoft Teams channel or email channel for your team — whichever you prefer. You'll also get the founders' phone numbers for text messaging when you need a fast answer.
