Article
Brochure
Executive Resource
Insight Hub
Ext. Publication
VideoOil & Gas Back-Office Modernization: Accounting Advisory Trends from NAPE 2026 | Podcast
Accounting Advisory Services
Never miss a thing.
Sign up to receive our insights newsletter.
In this episode of Weaver: Beyond the Numbers, Jon Roberts sits down with Chad Valentine at NAPE 2026 to discuss key accounting advisory trends in the energy industry. They explore how automation, system integration and back-office outsourcing are helping companies reduce manual work, improve accuracy and scale more efficiently — especially for startups and growing organizations.
Subscribe and listen to future episodes of Weaver: Beyond the Numbers on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
©2026
Detailed Description of Oil & Gas Back-Office Modernization: Accounting Advisory Trends from NAPE 2026
00:00:00
Jon: Hey, guys. Jon Roberts, tax energy PIC. I’m here at NAPE. I’m here with Chad Valentine in our accounting advisory group.
Just have some questions for you. Just generally talking about what you guys are seeing in the advisory accounting space these days.
00:00:14
Chad: Yeah. Great to be here. I think this is my 10th year at NAPE, or maybe even longer. I’d have to look back, but I enjoy out coming out here.
Yeah, as you mentioned, I head up the accounting advisory practice, and the energy space has been seeing a lot of activity.
00:00:29
Chad: I think one of the more common things that we see in my group, or that we’ve been helping our clients with, has been automation and cost savings on the back-office side. So, any financial reporting and accounting and banking relationships, or finance-related stuff is what my group tends to do.
00:00:48
Chad: And a recent project that we did is you’ve got all these legacy systems that are tied to oil and gas, and they do really well. But they’re old and maybe not cloud-based. Or if they are cloud-based, they’re new to it. And people like to stick with their systems, which is fine.
But we can get them to talk to one another, so that a process that used to take 20 hours a week can now take 30 minutes to an hour.
00:01:15
Jon: Mm-hmm.
00:01:15
Chad: Particularly on the revenue side — check distribution, EnergyLink, OpenInvoice — any of those legacy systems that have upgraded over time but don’t really talk to the accounting software, we can get them to talk usually.
And so we’ve seen some cost savings there for our clients by being able to scale back the number of hours it takes to get work done.
00:01:36
Jon: Is that just time savings, or the time value of money or anything else that —
00:01:40
Chad: It’s time value and then the error rate.
00:01:42
Jon: Error rate, yeah.
00:01:43
Chad: When you take humans out of it and you make it an automation, it’s a machine, so it’s literally just taking the data and matching it up. Whereas before, you probably had a manual process where you’ve downloaded a report. Now you’re having to manually input it into the accounting software. We eliminate that whole process.
00:01:59
Jon: Yeah. How long does that transformation from the old system to the new system take? Does it just depend on what the old system looks like?
00:02:05
Chad: Yeah. There are several factors you’d have to consider. We’ve had projects that take two weeks, and then we’ve had projects that take two months. Typically, it’s two months if you’re doing a full system movement.
But if you’re taking your existing systems and just getting them to talk to one another and not really changing much outside of that, that’s a short time frame — two weeks.
00:02:22
Jon: That’s not a huge period of time. What else are you seeing out there?
00:02:24
Chad: Other things that I’m seeing out in the market is a shift to back-office being outsourced for startups, as opposed to having a whole in-house accounting team.
One of the reasons behind that, and it makes total sense, is because of automation, AI — all these buzzwords. All it really does is reduce the amount of time it takes for someone to complete a task.
00:02:47
Chad: Back in the day, an accounting department in oil and gas was made up of two or three people. You can do it with one part-time person now, because the systems are just that much faster and better.
So outsourcing is a viable option because you only pay for the hours incurred, as opposed to carrying a full-time person and paying for their HR, their benefits and all that.
00:03:07
Jon: Yeah.
00:03:07
Chad: It’s just better to work with outsourcing.
00:03:08
Jon: That’s really where your group comes in with the back-office outsourcing.
00:03:11
Chad: Right. Yeah. We can either plug and play in for a specific need, or we can replace the whole back office. It just depends on what the need is.
00:03:18
Jon: And we’re location agnostic on all that, right?
00:03:21
Chad: We are. Most of our work is remote, but, you know, I’m based in Midland. We’ve got a Houston office. We’ve got a Dallas office. We’ve got an Oklahoma office.
00:03:28
Jon: Yeah.
00:03:29
Chad: We’ve got a West Coast office.
00:03:30
Jon: Awesome. Well, I appreciate it. We’ll catch up here in a bit, but yeah, thanks for listening in.
Podcast