The oil and gas month-end close, from the documents in the inbox to the package you hand a CPA.
A close is the month you can stand behind. Not the stack of PDFs, and not the bank balance. Every vendor bill, every partner’s share, and every revenue line still knows which well it belongs to, and the cash in the bank agrees with that story.
Oil and gas makes this slower than a normal set of books because the source documents are not yours alone. Operators send JIBs. Purchasers send statements. Field invoices arrive by email, portal, and sometimes a photograph. None of them share a layout. The close is the work of turning that pile into entries.
A close is finished when every dollar still knows which well it belongs to.
Here is the sequence, from the inbox to the package your CPA actually wants.
Vendor invoices, JIBs, revenue statements, bank activity, and the AFEs that capital charges belong to. A missing statement is the usual reason a close will not tie.
Gross costs land on the right well. If you operate, the deck turns them into JIBs. If you don’t, someone else’s JIB gets decoded the same way.
Gross, tax, and deducts by well. Cash that matches. A trial balance your CPA can take without rebuilding the month from PDFs.
List the documents the month requires before anyone starts coding. For an operator: every vendor bill, the deck, the overhead rates, and the revenue statements from each purchaser. For a non-operator: a JIB from each operator you own under, and a revenue statement from each purchaser or operator who pays you. Then the bank.
Chase what is missing immediately. A JIB that arrives three weeks late becomes a prior-period adjustment in a month that was already closed, which means both months are wrong until somebody cares enough to reopen them. Most people do not.
A water-hauling invoice that covers four wells is four lines. A JIB is as many lines as it has categories. A revenue statement is a line per product, per well, with tax and deducts beside it. The temptation is one entry per PDF. That entry is why, in April, nobody can say what a well cost in March.
The recurring cost of keeping a producing well online. Labor, chemicals, power, water, repairs. This is the number you watch.
Drilling, completion, equipment, a major workover. Coded to the AFE, not to LOE, so a project can be compared to the estimate that authorized it.
The COPAS rate, separate from vendor costs. Operators record the partners’ share as income. Everyone else records their share as a cost of the well.
Coding the vendor bill is half of an operator’s month. The other half is billing the people who own the rest of the well. Apply the deck that was in effect that month. Calculate overhead from the accounting procedure. Produce a statement that shows gross, interest, and share, by well, with capital and unusual items identified.
Then cut the partners’ share out of the gross expense and onto a receivable. Leave your own share on the well. A joint interest billing you drafted and did not post is a spreadsheet. The general ledger still thinks you own 100 percent.
If you do not operate, this step is reversed. The JIB arrives, you decode it, and you book your share. You do not issue it. The standard for how to read it is the same either way.
Book revenue at gross by product and well. Book severance tax and each deduct on its own. If the operator netted your JIB against your revenue, book both sides. The cash is the remainder. A bank reconciliation that “works” because you coded the net deposit to oil sales is a reconciliation of the wrong number.
No statement, no entry beyond a clearing account. Guessing the split is how deducts vanish.
The ACH matches an open payable. It does not get journaled straight to expense a second time.
Undeposited funds, JIB clearing, and revenue clearing are empty at the end of the close, or the balance is a list of named items, not a lump.
A trial balance. A bank reconciliation. Revenue and LOE by well. A list of what was capital. The JIBs you issued, or the JIBs you received. Revenue statements behind the gross. That package is a close. A folder of PDFs and a QuickBooks login is an invitation for the CPA to redo it.
Timing matters as much as the contents. Decisions about a well get made on the last close anyone trusted. A close that lands in the third week of the following month is a record of a decision you already missed.
Bring the documents and the file. Coding, JIBs, revenue, and a reconciliation — in the ledger you already have, on a schedule you can hand a CPA.
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.
