5 Ways to Unleash Land Productivity (Part 4)

Part 4 – Streamlining Ownership Data Management​

Chances are that your land team relies on one of the commonly used land management software packages on the market.  There’s only a few to choose from, so we don’t have to name names when we talk about the elephant in the room. These are legacy solutions, meaning the technology is decades old, a true antique.  Such land management solutions fail to meet the modern needs of the land department, requiring users to perform workarounds to get their job done, and worst of all, legacy land solutions are expensive.  If you’ve been following our “5 Ways to Unleash Land Productivity” blog series, you’ll know that we’ve been targeting legacy solutions with some candid criticism. It’s our way of helping land professionals understand the productivity pitfalls while showing how W Energy Software stacks up to the competition.

Were’ nearing the end of the series, so be sure to read or revisit overcoming inaccurate acreage reporting, ensuring land data integrity, and automating the payment approval process. The last blog in our series will explore the post-acquisition data onboarding challenge, but first let’s look at the daily struggle land professionals encounter managing, maintaining, and integrating ownership information.

Keeping Chain of Title Up to Date

One thing that will always keep the land department busy is constantly changing mineral, royalty, and working interest ownership. Ongoing drilling activity, A&D, and inheritance create a never-ending stream of interest changes as properties are sold, split up, or otherwise change hands. Chain of title must be continuously refreshed with up-to-date information for leases, tracts, and depth specific sub-tracts in order to ensure timely and accurate payments to interest owners.
What the land teams need is a way to not only cleanly and clearly complete bulk updates to records but also have a means to visualize chain of title. Unfortunately, with legacy land solutions users are forced to hunt for records in the dark and make updates a few at a time. It’s time consuming, impedes due diligence, and creates potential for inaccurate or delayed payments.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have an interactive, graphical presentation of chain of title to assist with ownership transfers? W Energy Software does that out of the box. We know what land professionals need because we are land professionals with extensive experience working for major producers. The frustration of using legacy land solutions is all too familiar, that’s why we’ve built W Energy Software’s land management solution with the features we know land pros need, like visualizing chain of title and bulk updating ownership with a click. Updates to agreements, tracts, and sub-tracts are instantaneous, hassle free, and ensure accurate payments.

Integrating Leases with Revenue Division of Interest

How easily does your current land solution handle a drilling-delay rental clause? This lease provision is a real curve ball and legacy land solutions will strike out every time. The reason is that any type of special payment, such as a delay rental or shut-in, requires a massive amount of work to push through because legacy land software is often paired with legacy revenue accounting, which don’t play well together. Because there is no integration between leases and revenue division of interest there is no immediate way to know who on the DOI is associated with the lease specific payment. As a result, getting those obligations paid can be a fire drill.
W Energy Software makes integrating leases and revenue DOIs simple because our land management and revenue accounting solutions were designed from the ground up as a fully unified platform that runs in the cloud. Our out-of-the-box integration between agreements and division orders enables you to instantly match a DOI NRI and/or GWI directly to its lease. The result is a crystal-clear view of chain of title and the assurance that payments are being issued to the correct and current parties on the lease.

Kelsi Flores spent over 11 years in Land Administration with XTO Energy, a subsidiary of EXXON Mobil before she joined W Energy Software. She is a Certified Division Order Analyst and past president of her local chapter. Over the last year and a half, she has worked tirelessly with land departments at E&P companies to create a best-in-class land solution for the industry. In her spare time, she enjoys cooking, reading, and spending time with her husband and 2 daughters, ages 2 and 6.