How we picked the payments infrastructure behind Joltly's AP product — and the broader bet on owning the payments layer in oil and gas.
When we started Joltly, the thesis was simple: bring what Brex, Bill.com, and Ramp had done for B2B office expenses to oil and gas. Their AP portals let you approve an invoice and pay it from the same screen — no bank file generation, no portal redirect, no “approved in the AP system, paid in the bank, reconciled by hand later.” For SaaS, marketing spend, contractor invoices, and the rest of the modern office stack, that workflow has been table stakes for almost a decade.
Nobody had brought it to oil and gas. The math was harder — oilfield invoices need to know about wells, AFEs, IDC vs. LOE, joint interest splits, and a chart of accounts no off-the-shelf AP tool understands — but the principle was the same.
The accounting workflow and the actual payment should live in the same place.
So we built that first: AI invoice coding paired with native vendor payments. Approve an oilfield invoice in Joltly, pay it from the same UI. No NACHA file, no bank portal upload, no second system.
As we’ve gone deeper, we’ve realized AP isn’t the only place this gap exists. Revenue distribution, JIB collections from non-op partners, severance remittances to states — every flow of money in production accounting has the same shape: the accounting math is solved, the money movement is bolted on the side. So we expanded our ambition: become the payments layer that closes that loop, end to end.
That meant we needed a payments partner. And we needed the right one — not just for ACH to vendors, but for the breadth of what we wanted to build next. We could build payment rails ourselves (no), partner with a traditional bank’s commercial API (slow), stitch together a few specialized vendors (fragile), or pick a single modern payments infrastructure provider that could handle the whole job.
We picked the last option, and the provider we picked was Moov. This is a quick, honest write-up of how we got there and why.
Calculate, statement, owner portal — the production-accounting workflow built for oil & gas.
Multi-rail money movement, embedded UX components, KYC & compliance, all via one API.
Same-day ACH, The Clearing House RTP (direct certification), and the long-tail rails for owners on any bank.
This is one of those problems that’s been frozen in place so long it stopped feeling like a problem. Operators have been moving money this way for three decades. The accounting systems they use were built around it. The finance teams expect it. The banks treat them like 1995-era batch customers, and everybody’s adapted. But once you actually look at the workflow, it’s hard to defend.
Royalty and revenue payments in oil and gas are uniquely awkward. A typical mid-sized operator pays hundreds — sometimes thousands — of owners every month. The amounts vary, the tax withholding is state-specific, prior-period adjustments are routine, and a real percentage of owners are still on paper checks because nobody’s ever asked them to switch.
The accounting math has been solved for years. The actual money movement is what’s still broken. Most operators export a NACHA file from their accounting system, log into their bank’s commercial portal, upload the file, manually approve the batch under a security token, and then go back into their accounting system to mark each owner paid. The owners with no bank info on file get a printed check in the mail. The “where’s my check?” calls flow into owner relations.
We wanted Joltly customers to skip all of that. One pay run, one click, money lands in owner accounts via the fastest rail available — without the operator having to touch their bank portal.
That meant we needed a payments partner. And we needed the right one.
Before we talked to anyone, we wrote down what we actually needed. The list was short but specific:
Same-day ACH for owners with bank info on file. RTP for instant settlement where supported. Push-to-card or check for the long tail. We did not want to integrate four vendors to cover the rails our customers need.
For RTP especially, we wanted a partner directly connected to The Clearing House — not someone routing through another sub-processor. Latency, reliability, and pricing all get worse the farther you are from the source.
Owner enrollment in ACH, bank verification, payment status — these need to feel like Joltly, not like a payments vendor’s branded redirect. We needed UI components we could drop into our own product.
We did not want to spend three months reading SOAP docs from 2008. We wanted REST, webhooks, idempotency, the basics done right.
KYC, AML, BSA, regulatory reporting. We did not want to become a bank ourselves. The provider needed to own this layer end-to-end.
We talked to most of the obvious names. The honest summary:
Moov gave us same-day ACH, RTP, push-to-card, and wires through one integration. When we want to add FedNow, we don’t go renegotiate a contract or learn a new API.
Moov is directly certified with The Clearing House for RTP. When a Joltly customer pays a royalty owner via real-time payments, the funds clear in seconds, 24/7/365 — no sub-processor in the middle.
Moov’s API was clearly designed by people who’ve shipped embedded payments before. Components like bank account verification (a $0.01 RTP credit confirms the account in one session) drop straight into our product. Owner enrollment doesn’t bounce them to a third-party domain.
Moov was founded by people who came out of the bank infrastructure world (early ACH open-source work, ex-Wells Fargo). When we asked hard questions about Reg E, settlement timing, and edge cases around suspense and reversals, the answers were specific and right.
REST API, well-organized docs, an open-source ACH library on GitHub (moov-io/ach) we could read before signing anything. The integration timeline from kickoff to first end-to-end test was weeks, not quarters.
Concretely, here’s what changes for an operator using Joltly with the Moov-powered payments layer:
For owners, the experience changes too: enroll in ACH from a self-service portal, get a notification when funds land, see history. The “where’s my check?” call goes away because the answer is on their screen. For owner relations teams, the visible change is the calls that don’t happen anymore.
But the headline result is what operators actually get out of it: more control over their cash flow, real transparency into where every dollar is at any moment, and a payments process that takes minutes instead of days. The previous workflow — export, upload, approve, reconcile by hand — cost time everywhere it touched. The new one gives operators that time back.
The honest reason we’re publishing this is broader than a partnership announcement.
For three decades, oil and gas operators have moved money the same way: spreadsheet → NACHA file → bank portal upload → printed check for whoever isn’t on ACH. The accounting math got better — the purpose-built O&G platforms are sophisticated, and the calculation engines for revenue distribution, JIB, and severance are mature. The money movement didn’t change. It’s still the legacy bank-batch workflow that ran on mainframes in the 1990s.
That’s the part of production accounting that’s about to change. Not because operators want to print fewer checks (though they do), but because the infrastructure to make it work differently finally exists. Five years ago, the only paths to modern payments in this industry were building it yourself or stitching together a half-dozen vendors. Today, a single provider — Moov — gives you same-day ACH, RTP, wires, and embedded UX through one API. That changes what’s possible at the application layer. And what’s possible at the application layer is what gets shipped to operators.
If you’re an operator and the gap between “the statement is ready” and “the owner has the money” still feels like a real problem in 2026, you’re not crazy. It is. We’re working on it.
If you’ve been frustrated by the gap between “the statement is ready” and “the owner has the money,” we’ll show you what an end-to-end pay run looks like in Joltly — from DOI deck to ACH-in-the-owner’s-account, in one workflow.
Written by the Joltly team. We build AI-powered AP, invoice automation, and modern revenue payments for oil and gas operators.
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