Oil prices above $60 a barrel change the math for drilling in the United States. New territory opens up, and new territory without infrastructure means one thing for you: gathering and transportation constraints. If you connect wellheads to refiners, you are about to get busier, and knowing your financial position today means you can move faster when the call comes.
That timing question sits underneath a bigger one. If your finance and accounting run on systems built for a different era, you feel the gaps every month.
The problems you live with
Budget visibility for capital projects. Every pipeline or facility you build runs against an Authorization for Expenditure, or AFE: essentially a budget tied to a specific capex project. Tracking that budget against actual spend, line by line, usually means leaving your accounting system entirely. You pull numbers into Excel to see where a project is trending, and by the time the picture is clear, the spending has already happened.
Your approval process often looks even more manual. One version we hear about often: a paper file moves from desk to desk, VP to VP, while someone tries to track down whether everyone signed off yet.
Production and financial data that live apart. Every month, someone on your team takes production volumes from one system and manually keys them into the balance sheet and income statement in another. It works, but it adds a recurring task that carries real risk of error, especially when last-minute adjustments come in.
Limited visibility into facility health. The compression and gathering facility at the center of your pipeline network is where volume gets collected, processed, and routed. Knowing that equipment is running well, and catching a problem before it becomes an outage, matters more as your network grows. Most finance teams have no natural line of sight into that operational data today.
Financing decisions made on incomplete information. Drilling permits are climbing in the counties next door. That is a signal to start building. But knowing when to raise capital and how fast you can build a new facility depends on having a real-time read on your financial position, not last quarter’s close.
How NetSuite addresses each one
AFE tracking with real budget visibility. NetSuite gives every AFE a home in your financial system, with budget-to-actual visibility down to the line item. You can see where spend is trending while a project is still underway, not after the fact. Approval workflows replace the paper trail: an AFE gets created, and NetSuite routes it automatically to the right approvers.
One system for production and financial data. NetSuite can bring in your month-end production volumes through a statistical journal entry, pairing operational data with financial reporting in the same system. Production data flows to your income statement. Capital spend flows to your balance sheet. The manual reconciliation step goes away.
AI-supported facility monitoring. Plative’s cloud practice can build monitoring that watches operational data from your gathering and compression facilities and flags anomalies before they become failures. This addresses a concern that sits with your CEO, not just your controller: is the infrastructure at the center of your network healthy, and are maintenance schedules keeping pace with it.
Reporting and dashboards built for your business. NetSuite’s reporting is flexible enough to reflect how you actually run, not a generic template. That means dashboards and key metrics built around the questions you actually ask, not the ones a generic ERP assumes.
What implementation looks like for you
The technical lift here is smaller than you might expect. Setting up AFE tracking and building a signoff workflow are configuration tasks, not custom development. Most of the complexity in your ERP evaluation comes from something else entirely: whether your implementation partner understands your business.
A partner who doesn’t ask the right questions has already lost credibility in the room. You do not run a traditional sales cycle, and a partner unfamiliar with that reality will slow your implementation down and erode trust along the way.
Your most useful preparation for an evaluation, then, is not a technical checklist. It is finding a partner who has worked in oil and gas before, who can speak to AFEs and gathering facilities without a glossary, and who can translate that experience into a system built around how your business actually runs.
Why Plative
Growth in this industry tends to arrive faster than infrastructure can respond to it. You will be best positioned to keep up if you can see your numbers clearly and choose a partner who already speaks your language.
Plative is that partner. We know midstream because we have worked in it, and we build NetSuite around how pipeline operators actually run, not how a generic implementation guide says they should. If you are evaluating a new ERP or wondering whether your current system can keep up with where drilling is headed, talk to someone who already knows the industry.
Reach out and let’s talk through where your business stands today.
About me
I come at this from an unusual angle for an ERP consultant. I am a CPA who came up through Big 4 accounting and worked as a financial controller in the energy and resources sector before I ever sold software. I have sat on the finance team’s side of the table, closing books and managing budgets for companies like yours.
From there, I spent three years at Oracle NetSuite as a Solution Consultant, where I built out NetSuite’s oil and gas practice and became the team’s go-to in the industry. I have presented on ERP best practices for oil and gas, and I have guided implementations across the midstream space, from pipeline operators to fleet-heavy operations.
That combination, CPA training, hands-on controller experience, and years focused specifically on oil and gas ERP, means a conversation with me starts with your business, not a product pitch.