JIB processing, AFE tracking, working interest accounting, division orders, multi-entity oilfield structures, and job costing built for service-company economics — delivered by an accounting team with deep oil & gas experience. For Texas oilfield service companies, small operators, and working interest owners.
Frac, wireline, completions, water transfer, equipment rental, hot shot, roustabout, swabbing, well servicing, and other businesses that show up to the job site, perform the work, and invoice the operator. Service-company economics are job-based, equipment-heavy, multi-entity, and operate on operator payment cycles that can run 60-90 days.
Small operators, working interest partners, royalty owners, mineral rights owners, and family entities that hold interests across multiple wells, operators, and basins. The accounting is JIB-driven, division-order-based, and lives at the intersection of revenue checks, severance taxes, depletion, and partnership accounting.
Service trucks running across three basins. Field tickets piling up in a binder. Operator invoices going out weeks late. AR aging stretching to 90+ days while payroll keeps coming. The bookkeeper inherited from a smaller version of the business can't scale with where you are now.
Working interest statements arrive monthly from your operators. They go into a folder. Nobody verifies the cost allocations, nobody catches double-charged expenses, nobody booked the activity into your own books correctly. You're paying for things you can't audit.
Operating LLC. Equipment LLC. Real estate LLC. Trucks LLC. Mineral interests LLC. Family management LLC. Every transaction has a "right" entity — and lately every transaction is ending up in the wrong one. The cleanup at year-end is becoming the entire month of January.
Oil & gas accounting has its own vocabulary. The terms aren't optional jargon — each one represents a specific accounting concept with specific bookkeeping implications. We use these terms in conversations with clients every day, and we expect to. Most general bookkeepers don't know them, which is exactly why oil & gas businesses keep ending up with books that don't reflect reality.
This isn't an exhaustive list — but it's the working vocabulary your accounting team should be fluent in. When we onboard an oil & gas client, we don't need to be educated on what a JIB is or how an AFE works. We need to be educated on your business: your wells, your partners, your entity structure, your operator relationships.
Oilfield service companies face a specific set of accounting challenges that don't exist anywhere else in the economy. You're running trucks, equipment, and crews across multiple basins. You bill operators on field tickets that may or may not get paid for 60-90 days. You burn fuel and diesel like a small country. Your payroll includes hourly rig hands, salaried supervisors, per-diem allowances, and 1099 hot shot drivers who all need to be paid right and reported right at year-end.
Here's how we handle the work that's specific to service companies.
The fundamental unit of oilfield service accounting is the job. Every job has its own revenue (the operator invoice), its own direct costs (crew labor, equipment, fuel, materials), and its own margin. Without real job costing, your service company is flying blind on which jobs make money, which operators pay reliably, and which work types you should pursue or walk away from.
Real job costing in an oilfield service business tracks:
The output is what every operator-owner wants and almost none of them have: a monthly report showing job-level margin by service line, by operator, by basin. That report tells you what to do more of and what to do less of. Most service companies operate on instinct because they've never had this data.
Operators are not fast payers. Your service company's cash flow gymnastics around the operator payment cycle — running payroll Friday for work that won't be paid until two months from now — is one of the most stressful parts of running an oilfield service business. The accounting has to support this with:
If your service company is consistently making payroll, paying fuel, paying truck notes, and then writing yourself a check from whatever's left — sometimes nothing — you don't have a profitability problem. You have a cash management problem. Real 13-week forecasting and operator AR discipline almost always fix this. The money is there; it's just on the wrong side of the calendar.
Almost no successful Texas oilfield service company runs in a single LLC. The typical structure looks something like:
Each entity has its own books, its own bank accounts, its own tax filings, and its own role in the structure. Intercompany rents, leases, and management fees have to be documented at arm's-length amounts. Books that mix entities together — which happens constantly when the bookkeeper doesn't understand the structure — create both tax exposure and inability to produce financials any lender or buyer will trust.
We run multi-entity books across as many LLCs as your structure requires, with intercompany activity reconciled monthly and consolidated financials produced when the bank or your CPA needs to see the whole picture.
If you own pieces of producing wells — whether you're a small operator running a handful of properties, a working interest investor with stakes in 30 wells across three operators, or a family entity holding mineral interests inherited from a grandparent — your accounting needs are different from a service company's. You're not running a fleet. You're managing a portfolio of paper interests that generate revenue checks, JIB statements, AFE requests, and a lot of paperwork most people don't know how to handle.
A Joint Interest Billing (JIB) is the monthly statement an operator sends to working interest partners showing each partner's proportional share of operating costs and revenue for a property. JIBs vary widely in format, detail, and accuracy — some operators produce clean, well-documented statements; others produce something that arrives in your inbox as a barely-readable PDF with no detail behind the numbers.
We process JIBs on both sides of the relationship:
One of our most common findings on new working interest engagements: the client has been receiving JIBs from one or more operators for years, filing them in a folder, and never reconciling them. When we go back and audit, we routinely find 5-15% of allocated costs that don't belong to the property — and in a multi-million-dollar interest portfolio, that adds up to real money. Operators don't always do this maliciously; sometimes they just made a coding error nobody caught. But somebody has to catch it.
An Authorization for Expenditure (AFE) is the document an operator sends to working interest partners before incurring significant capital spending — drilling a new well, performing a workover, completing a recompletion, or making a major equipment replacement. The AFE is essentially a budget approval request: "Here's what we plan to spend; do you consent to your share?"
Once approved, the AFE becomes the budget against which actual costs are tracked. Operators report quarterly or semi-annually on AFE-to-actual variances. Working interest owners need to know whether projects are running on budget, why they're not when they aren't, and whether to consent to future AFEs from this operator based on their track record.
We maintain AFE tracking — your approved AFEs, your committed cash, actual spend to date, variance to budget, and the supporting documentation — so when an operator comes back with a request for an additional cash call, you have the data to decide whether to fund it or push back.
Your revenue from an oil & gas property is governed by a division order — a document showing your exact decimal interest in the revenue from a producing well. Division orders are surprisingly easy to be wrong. They get out of sync when properties change hands, when interests are transferred, when production allocations shift, when royalty interests get carved out, or when overriding royalties are conveyed.
Every monthly revenue check should be reconciled to:
We reconcile revenue checks, flag discrepancies, and follow up with operators on missing payments or incorrect allocations. This is unglamorous accounting work that protects real money — clients often discover 2-5% revenue leakage that's been quietly happening for years.
Oil & gas owners face a tax environment most accountants don't fully understand. Texas severance tax is deducted at the well-head and reported by the operator. Federal depletion deductions (percentage or cost depletion, whichever is more favorable) reduce taxable income from oil & gas revenue. Federal tax basis in oil & gas properties differs from accounting basis and requires its own tracking schedule.
We don't prepare oil & gas tax returns — that's your tax CPA's job — but we maintain the books at a level of detail that supports their work. Severance tax tracked by property and year. Depletion calculations supported by the underlying revenue and basis data. Property basis schedules updated each year. When your CPA sits down to prepare your return, they get a clean picture rather than a fire drill.
30-minute discovery call. Bring us your last three months of financials, your entity list, and your operator relationships. We'll tell you where the books are leaving money on the table — and whether we're the right team to fix it.
Book a Discovery Call →Whether you're running a service company doing $8M in annual revenue or holding working interests across 40 wells, every Anchor Point engagement includes the same monthly foundation — plus the oil & gas-specific deliverables your business actually needs.
For service companies — every job's revenue, direct cost, and margin, with service line and operator-level rollups so you know what's working.
Operator-issued or owner-received, JIBs handled monthly with cost audits, allocation verification, and booked activity into your books.
Approved AFEs maintained, actual costs tracked against budget, variances reported, supporting documentation organized for partner audits.
Monthly revenue checks reconciled against volume, price, and division order. Discrepancies flagged and followed up with operators.
Every LLC in your structure runs clean books with intercompany activity properly recorded. Consolidated financials produced when needed.
For service companies — rolling forecast that maps operator AR inflows against payroll, fuel, equipment, and other commitments.
Severance tax tracked by property, federal property basis schedules maintained, depletion-ready data prepared for your tax CPA.
Quarterly or monthly conversations about cash, operator concentration, banking, AFE decisions, and the financial direction of the business.
Oil & gas businesses don't bank like other businesses. The volatility of revenue, the equipment-heavy capital structure, the reserve-based lending facilities, the working capital fluctuations tied to operator payment cycles — none of this fits cleanly into a standard commercial bank's underwriting model. The banks that do oil & gas lending well are specialists. The bankers who run those programs want to see specific financial packages presented a specific way.
Curtis Hollis, CPA — one of our two principals — spent his career before Anchor Point in corporate banking and lending. He knows what oil & gas bankers look at, what makes them say yes, and what makes them say no.
If your oil & gas business is preparing for a refinancing, an acquisition, an equipment purchase, or a partner buyout — Curtis is the one assembling the financial story your banker, lender, or investor wants to read.
Yes. Oilfield service companies are one of our core specialties — frac services, wireline, completions, water transfer, equipment rental, hot shot, roustabout, swabbing, and other service-side businesses operating across Texas oilfield basins. We handle the job costing, multi-entity structures, and revenue recognition that make oilfield service accounting different from general construction or trucking accounting.
Joint Interest Billing is the process by which an operator bills working interest partners for their proportional share of well operating costs. JIB statements are issued monthly and require detailed allocation of operating expenses, capital expenditures, and revenue distribution among all working interest owners in a property. We process JIBs on both sides — for operators issuing them to partners, and for working interest owners receiving them who need to reconcile, audit, and properly book the activity into their own financials.
An AFE is the budget document operators issue to working interest partners before incurring significant capital expenditures (drilling, completion, workover, etc.). The accounting needs to track actual costs against AFE budgets, allocate costs to the correct AFE category, and report variances back to working interest owners. AFE accounting is a layer above standard project accounting — most general bookkeepers don't know what an AFE is, let alone how to track against one.
Yes. Working interest owners (who pay a share of costs and receive a share of revenue) and royalty owners (who receive revenue without bearing costs) have specific accounting needs: division order tracking, revenue check stub reconciliation, depletion calculations, severance tax handling, and proper booking of working interest activity from operator JIBs. We work with individuals, family entities, trusts, and small holding companies that own interests across multiple properties and operators.
Multi-entity is the norm in oil & gas. A typical operating company owner might have an operating LLC, a real estate LLC holding the yard and equipment, a separate LLC for trucks or equipment leased to the operating company, a mineral interest LLC, and a family management LLC. We run consolidated books across all entities, manage intercompany transactions, and produce both standalone and consolidated financial statements that hold up for lenders, partners, and eventual sale.
No — we hand off to your tax CPA. Oil & gas tax preparation is a specialized discipline, especially around depletion, intangible drilling costs, and partnership taxation, and we focus on what we do best (the books, the operations, the monthly close, the CFO conversation). What we do is maintain your books at a level of detail that makes your tax CPA's job easier and your return preparation faster. If you don't have an oil & gas-savvy tax CPA, we can refer you to several we trust.
Monthly engagements for oil & gas businesses at Anchor Point typically range from $5,000 to $15,000+ depending on the number of entities, transaction volume, JIB processing complexity, and how much CFO-level guidance is involved. Oilfield service companies with multiple entities and high transaction volumes often run higher than our base pricing. Working interest owners with smaller, simpler portfolios can fall closer to our $3,000 base. All engagements are fixed-fee, quoted up front, with no hourly billing.
Whether you're running an oilfield service company with five trucks or holding working interests across 30 wells, 30 minutes with us will tell you what your books should be showing you and aren't. No pitch. No pressure. Just oil & gas accounting talked about by people who actually know it.