From Paper to Payable: What Changes When You Implement E‑Invoicing

I want you to think about how many people in your company spend their day touching an invoice. Not analyzing costs. Not negotiating rates. Not making decisions that move the business forward. Just touching invoices. Receiving them. Matching them. Routing them for approval. Chasing down the foreman who hasn’t signed off yet. Keying the numbers into the accounting system. Fixing the ones that got keyed wrong.

Now ask yourself: what if 80 to 90 percent of that work just went away?

That’s not a number I made up. Robert Wichert shared it on Wisdom at the Wellhead. He said there have been discussions around Open Invoice where they’ve measured a reduction of 80 to 90 percent of accounting staff managing invoices, bids, and that whole side of the business. And his reaction was the same as mine: that’s really powerful.

What happens to your company when the back office stops being a bottleneck and starts being an advantage?

Your Vendors Are Already in the System

Robert has been watching Open Invoice for twenty years. He saw it when it was still Digital Oilfield, and he’s watched it evolve into what it is today. What drew him to it for Cougar is something most people overlook: the vendors are already there.

He explained it this way: all of the vendors are already kind of pre-approved, loaded on the Open Invoice system, which will be mostly the vendors that Cougar will be using also. So they’re already connected. On top of that, the system handles automatic bidding and price books for different vendors. What that means in practice is that when Cougar needs a service, the bid process and the pricing are already structured. You’re not starting from scratch. You’re not calling three companies and asking them to fax you a quote. The system knows who does the work, what they charge, and how to route the approval.

I remember when every invoice was a paper chase. Field ticket goes to the foreman. Foreman signs it and sends it to the office. Office matches it to the purchase order, which may or may not have been entered correctly. Somebody re-keys it into accounting. Somebody else checks the coding. By the time the vendor gets paid, weeks have gone by, errors have been introduced at every step, and nobody is completely sure the number is right. That’s not a system. That’s a relay race where everybody drops the baton.

What That 80 to 90 Percent Actually Buys You

When Robert talks about reducing 80 to 90 percent of the accounting staff managing invoices and bids, he’s not talking about laying people off. He’s talking about never having to hire them in the first place. That’s a critical distinction for a startup. Every person you don’t have to hire for data entry is a dollar you can spend on an engineer, a geologist, or a field hand who is actually producing value.

Robert was direct about what this means for Cougar’s operating model. On the G&A side, they’ll have a lot lighter load than a company of their equivalent production base. But they’ll be able to attract better talent because they can afford to pay a premium and offer superior bonuses. The money that a conventional operator spends on bodies to massage data, Cougar spends on the people who actually move the business forward.

I made the same observation on the podcast: this solves a lot of your resource problems. You can go after the talent you need rather than just the bodies to fill data-entry chairs. And that’s exactly what Robert is doing. He’s not building a lean company by cutting corners. He’s building one by eliminating the work that shouldn’t exist in the first place.

Scale Without Hiring a New AP Department Every Time

Here’s where this connects to growth. Robert’s plan is to scale Cougar rapidly through both internal drilling and strategic acquisitions. Every new property means more vendors, more invoices, more field tickets, more bids. In a conventional company, that means more accounting staff. More desks. More overhead. Every acquisition makes your G&A heavier.

Robert’s point was clear: because the invoicing is automated and the vendors are already connected, Cougar can scale very rapidly. They’re not hiring a whole bunch of people for a different project. They can leverage into new properties without the back office becoming a bottleneck.

I’ve watched companies grow into their own G&A problems. They add production, and then they add people to manage the paperwork that comes with that production, and before long the overhead eats up the margin they were chasing in the first place. The operator next door who automated the vendor chain from day one adds the same production and barely notices it in his back office. Same barrels. Same revenue. Completely different cost structure. And over time, that difference compounds.

The Cost Nobody Counts: Errors

Robert touched on something in the conversation that I want to make sure doesn’t get lost. When he was describing what happens with siloed, disconnected data sources, he said the result is problems when you try to replicate things. Time consuming at the very least. I jumped in and added: sometimes debilitating. And Robert agreed: error prone, for sure.

That word “debilitating” came from me, and I used it because I’ve seen it. I’ve seen companies where the invoice errors were so persistent that the vendors stopped trusting the operator’s numbers. I’ve seen projects delayed because the field ticket didn’t match the PO and nobody could figure out which one was wrong. I’ve seen month-end close turn into a two-week detective operation because the data was entered in three different places and none of them agreed.

None of that happens when the vendor chain is connected. The invoice comes in through the system. It matches to the work order. The pricing matches the price book. The approval routes to the person who authorized the work. If something doesn’t match, it gets flagged. If everything matches, it flows through. No re-keying. No phone calls. No detective work at month-end.

Final Thought

The back office is not where most oil companies think about competitive advantage. They think about acreage, completions, rig rates, decline curves. But the company that can add a hundred wells to its portfolio without adding a single AP clerk is operating in a different reality than the one that needs three new hires every time production grows.

Robert figured that out before Cougar produced its first barrel. The vendor chain is connected. The invoicing is automated. The money that would have gone to managing paper goes to managing wells instead. And every property Cougar adds makes that decision look smarter.

Robert Wichert didn’t just automate invoicing. He removed an entire category of overhead before the company ever started operating. Hear how that fits into Cougar Energy’s broader strategy on Wisdom at the Wellhead.