How We Deployed QuickBooks In An Oil & Gas Company

Learn more from our implementation experience in the oil and gas sector; a simple guide to deploying accounting software for petroleum companies.

This article is an expanded review of a previous post on accounting software for a petrol station. Following our implementation of QuickBooks accounting software in an oil and gas company, we will be adding more details and what you should know about setting up QuickBooks in the Oil and Gas sector.

Ordinarily, you may think that such oil and gas implementation job requires a bespoke or customised software designed specifically for the oil industry but that’s not the case. We have been using QuickBooks to help our clients organise their books and improve their accounting system for over 4 years, so, it’s quite flexible for us to find a way around to make oil & gas set easy.

Customising QuickBooks for an industry like this is not new, we have successfully implemented this software in a more complex environment like micro-credit and financing, manufacturing and real estate.

Here are few of the major customization I did:

• For equipment used in drilling wells, we created an asset account (including the asset classes within the office environment.) and accumulated depreciation of each equipment so that we can monitor the ending value as at the end of the financial year.
• For crude oil and gas available and stored in farm tanks, we created an inventory account to track quantity available (using the barrel as a unit of measurement), cost per barrel and sales account to track all crude oil sales in US dollars and Naira.
• We also realised they run multiple banks in different currencies which demanded that we create their account heads while taking into account the ending balances as at conversion date and base currency.
• For loan facility offered by banks to finance expansion and add more drilling projects, we created a loan account in US (that’s the currency the loan was disbursed), interest rate account in US dollars and updated the exchange so that QuickBooks report will show the home currency equivalent of the loan, debt servicing and any gain or loss that arises are recorded in profit or loss account.
• For new crude discoveries, we used the “stock adjustment window” to add more barrels (since it’s the official unit of measure) which will eventually increase the oil and gas reserve and assign the cost of the project to cost of sale. You will find crude oil and gas on hand on the inventory report.
• Contractors were also employed to handle several projects and report their deliverables to my client. While some were paid in Naira, others receive their charges in US dollars. What I did was to create each contractor and assign the appropriate currency to their name so that QuickBooks will recognise which contractors get paid local and foreign currency.
• Finally, we customised the report to make it flexible for management to see crude oil sales, gas sales, oil and gas reserves, project cost, exchange rate gain or loss.

If you have more questions or need clarifications on how QuickBooks accounting software can effectively work for your oil and gas (petroleum) business and make accounting system more flexible, connect with us at info@accountingsoftware.com.ng or call 08105090001