Why an oil and gas revenue check never equals barrels times price: tax, deducts, your decimal, and netting against a JIB.
Take the barrels. Multiply by the price you heard. The check is smaller. It is smaller every month, and the gap is not a bank fee.
The check is the last line of a revenue statement. Between the wellhead and that line sit volume, price, your decimal, severance tax, and a stack of post-production deductions that every purchaser names differently. Books that deposit the check and move on cannot tell you whether the well made money, or whether the deducts grew.
The check is the last line. The statement is the accounting.
Here is the path from gross value to the deposit, and what each step is allowed to take out.
Oil in barrels, gas in Mcf, NGLs on their own line. Price is the price on the statement, not the posting you saw in a group text.
Each one is its own line. “Other” is where deducts go to hide.
Working interest, royalty, or overriding royalty. Then, sometimes, a JIB netted against what you are owed.
Gross value is the purchaser’s volume times the purchaser’s price, for the whole well. Your ownership comes later. If you multiply your barrels by price and then wonder where the rest went, you have skipped a step — the statement is often still showing 8/8ths volumes at the top.
Oil, gas, and plant products each get a price and a unit. Gas priced in MMBtu and measured in Mcf will not foot if you treat them as the same number. A residue-gas line and an NGL line are two sales, even when they arrive in one ACH.
Post-production costs are the reason the check shrinks. They are also the costs a lease may or may not allow the purchaser, or the operator, to charge a royalty owner. Working-interest owners generally bear them. The statement should still show them one by one.
A tax on the value, or sometimes the volume, taken before you are paid. It is not a deduct in the lease sense. It is its own account. Netting it into “revenue” makes the tax invisible and the price look worse than it was.
Moving the product from the lease to a plant or a sales point. Often a rate per barrel or per Mcf. Watch the rate month to month, not just the dollars, because volume changes hide a rate change.
Plant fees, treating, and the gas burned as fuel or lost to shrink. Shrink is volume that never becomes a sale. If you only book cash, shrink never hits the books at all.
A fee for selling the product. Small, easy to ignore, and worth keeping on its own line so a new purchaser’s fee is obvious.
After tax and deducts, the statement applies an interest. A working-interest owner, a royalty owner, and an overriding-royalty owner can all be paid from the same well on the same statement, at different decimals, with different deducts. Booking “the deposit” to a single revenue account merges all of that into one number.
Net revenue for the books is gross value, minus tax, minus deducts, times the decimal that matches your division order. If the decimal on the statement does not match the division order, the argument is with the pay deck, not with the price.
Working interest bears JIB costs. Royalty does not. An override is a carved-out share of revenue. The account you post to should say which one this line is.
Oil, gas, and NGLs stay apart. Two wells on one check stay apart. The ACH total is what the bank matches. It is not the journal entry.
Book the gross value as revenue and the deducts as their own accounts. A net-only entry hides deduct creep until somebody happens to open last year’s PDF.
Operators often net what you owe them against what they owe you. The deposit is then revenue minus your JIB, or the other way around. A $4,000 deposit can be $11,000 of revenue and a $7,000 joint interest bill. Book the deposit as revenue and the well’s LOE is understated by the entire JIB.
The statement, or the settlement statement next to it, has to be the source. The bank line only proves the net cash moved.
Deduct dollars move when production moves. A gathering rate that went from $0.40 to $0.65 a barrel is the thing you can actually ask about. Once a quarter, put this month’s statement next to the same purchaser and the same well from three months ago and read the rates. That is the entire control. It takes ten minutes when the lines are already coded, and it is impossible when the month was booked as one deposit.
Any purchaser, any layout. We split gross, tax, deducts, and net by well and product, and we keep the JIB out of the revenue account when the operator netted the check.
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.
