EnergyLink Invoice Reconciliation Automation for a US Oil Producer
- Client
- Oil and gas producer · United States · NYSE-listed, about 120 group companies
- Industry
- Energy & Utilities
- Department
- Finance & Accounting
- Region
- United States · North America
Ten working days a month of an accountant's time went on downloading reports before reconciliation could even start, and discrepancies in partner invoices surfaced late, if at all. Now a UiPath robot collects the data for about 120 group companies, reconciles the invoices against well data and sends every discrepancy to the team that owns it. One full-time role of manual work is gone.
A working model of the approach on sample data. It plays on its own and pauses when scrolled away; nothing here touches a live system.
The results
- ~120
- group companies covered every month
- Five differently filtered reports each, about 600 a month.
- 1 FTE
- of manual work replaced Projected
- A fully automated monthly process. Estimate from the delivery team; the client did not measure ROI.
- ~10 days
- of downloading removed every month Projected
- About 120 working days a year. Estimate from the delivery team.
The challenge
Our client is a fast-growing, NYSE-listed US oil and gas producer that has grown largely through acquisitions. At the time of the project the group had about 120 companies.
In US oil and gas, operators bill their partners through joint interest billing (JIB) invoices and report production and revenue well by well. Our client received these through EnergyLink, the Enverus platform where operators post invoices and revenue statements for their partners. Every month those invoices had to be reconciled against the company's own well data, and every step was manual.
Before reconciliation could even start, an employee logged into EnergyLink and downloaded five reports for each company, each with its own filters. For about 120 companies that took around ten working days a month.
What it was costing them
- Ten days of downloading every month. Around 600 report downloads before any reconciliation began.
- A full-time role spent on mechanics. Downloading and cross-referencing together took one full FTE.
- Discrepancies found late. Mismatches between invoices and well data surfaced only after the downloads were finished, and chasing them across teams was manual.
- Growth made it worse. Every acquisition added companies and wells to the monthly cycle.
- Scans in the mix. Part of the invoice data arrived as scanned documents, which resist simple extraction.
- ~10 days downloading by hand
- 0 manual downloads
- 120 companies x 5 reports, about 600 a month, now collected by the robot
The approach
We built a UiPath robot that runs the whole monthly reconciliation cycle, from the first EnergyLink download to a discrepancy in front of the right team. It was built in about a month.
From EnergyLink to a routed discrepancy
- Collect. The robot logs into EnergyLink and downloads the five reports for every company in the group, each with its own filters.
- Gather the well data. It collects the oil-well data the invoices have to agree with.
- Bring in the scans. Scanned invoices, the hardest part of the build, are brought into the same reconciliation as the digital data.
- Reconcile. Invoice data is cross-referenced against the well data to find discrepancies in reporting.
- Route to people. For every discrepancy the robot raises a task for the responsible team in UiPath Action Center, so the team works only the exceptions.
- EnergyLink reports → Reconciliation
- Oil-well data → Reconciliation
- Scanned invoices → Reconciliation
Built to UiPath best practice
- Robotic Enterprise Framework. Configuration, queues, business versus system exceptions, retries and logging.
- Unattended. Runs on an unattended robot managed from UiPath Orchestrator.
Technology
| Layer | What we used |
|---|---|
| Automation | UiPath Studio, Robotic Enterprise Framework |
| Orchestration | UiPath Orchestrator, unattended robot |
| Human in the loop | UiPath Action Center |
| Data source | Enverus EnergyLink (web) |
| Documents | Scanned-invoice processing |
| Reconciliation and reporting | Excel |
The outcome
Every month the reconciliation runs without anyone downloading a report. The team sees only the discrepancies, already assigned to it.
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Downloading EnergyLink reports | ~10 working days a month, by hand | Automatic |
| Reports per cycle | ~600, one by one | Collected by the robot |
| Reconciliation against well data | Manual cross-referencing | Automatic |
| Discrepancies | Found late, chased by email | Routed to the responsible team in Action Center |
| Effort | One full-time role | Exception handling only |
- One full-time role of manual work replaced by a fully automated monthly process.
- About ten working days of downloading removed every month, roughly 120 working days a year.
- Around 120 companies and five reports per company covered every month.
- Discrepancies reach the right team through Action Center instead of being chased by email.
- Built in about a month. On our estimate from the value of the replaced role, the build pays for itself inside a year. The client did not measure ROI.
The risk most teams miss
A reconciliation robot is only as good as its coverage, and in an acquisitive company the list of entities changes every quarter. A robot hard-wired to last year's companies silently skips the new ones. The second trap is scanned invoices: a small share of the volume that takes most of the effort. Keep the entity list and report filters in configuration, send anything the robot cannot read or match to a person, and the monthly close stays complete as the group grows.
Another UiPath and Action Center build for a US company: shipping document processing for an industrial distributor.
Built with
The tools this ran on, by the layer each one carried.
- Apps & integration
- Automation
UiPath StudioUiPath's design environment for building RPA workflows.
UiPath OrchestratorCentral control for UiPath robots: queues, schedules, assets and credentials.- UiPath Action CenterHuman-in-the-loop tasks for UiPath robots.
- UiPath REFrameworkUiPath's Robotic Enterprise Framework for transactional, retry-safe robots.
- Data & cloud
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