A Tool For Tracking Your Bakken Royalties -- September 6, 2014

A reader has sent me the link to his "royalty-tracking" tool / website.

The link: https://myroyaltyreport.com/

This is the background from the reader:

The service evolved from my work in monitoring our family’s mineral interests.

Early on I designed a excel spreadsheet and would manually input the monthly production data and cross reference the royalty check statement with the NDIC data. Only a few months after starting to monitor the wells, I spotted a substantial disparity (over 8,000 bbls) between the royalty check statement’s barrels sold and the NDIC’s barrels sold.

I contacted the oil company and was initially told they would look into it. Months passed without any action and then quietly a correction was made to a monthly royalty check with no explanation as to why.

I then decided that I needed to pay closer attention to what was happening with our minerals on a continuing basis. At first it was exciting and easy to monitor a few individual wells each month, it was like a birthday present every 30 days. As the development of the Bakken continued and the drilling progressed from lease holding to field development, the time spent monthly to manually input the data into the spreadsheet started becoming a part time job.

That was the point that the idea for myRoyalty Report was born. A friend was also interested in the Bakken activity and had the computer/web skills to automate the collection of data process for my spreadsheet. After some initial trial and error we decided to make the process purely a web based activity.

Soon family friends that have mineral interests were asking if I would help them monitor their interests also.

With their feedback, we continued to refine the website and decided to build a business around the service and open it up to any North Dakota mineral owner that is interested in monitoring their minerals.

The website provides data tailored specifically to a client’s current production data, royalty check verification, historical production data, monthly & life of well charts and a file cabinet for storage and easy access to their lease specific details. If you are interested in seeing what the website has to offer, please visit the site, https://myroyaltyreport.com and click the sign-in button in the upper right corner. We have set up a sample account for people to explore the website.

I don't own any mineral rights, but anything that might help others, I am glad to post or link such tools (as long as there isn't much of a monetizing component to the site).

I've said many, many times: if you are receiving royalties from one Bakken Pool well, you will eventually have four wells; probably 8, and possibly 12 or more. A financial adviser puts it this way for farmers who still own their mineral rights in the Bakken: you are no longer a farmer; you are an oil man (or woman).

My hunch is that many folks have developed their own tools for tracking their wells, but I still suggest that once you have four or more wells, you should have professional assistance.

Back to the linked "royalty report." A similar thing happened to me. When I first started following the Bakken, I wanted to track it using Microsoft Word. However, it quickly became clear that a web-based system would work much, much better. I went from Microsoft Word to html (the blog), and decided that I might as well share it with others who want to learn more about the Bakken, at least as I understand it.

The best thing that came out of posting my information on the internet: all the news and links that readers send me. A huge "thank you" to all.