Page 43 - North American Clean Energy September/October 2019 Issue

and charts, to answer timely questions like “What is the status of my assets today?” and “What tasks do I need to complete to maintain my land rights?”
4. Automate complex manual processes
Few aspects of land management are as complex as royalty clauses. Often based on multiple variables, these calculations typically escalate over time, and may include minimum amounts or true up payments. Many operators still use spreadsheets for these convoluted payment calculations. By using land management software, it just takes seconds for industry leaders to leverage those spreadsheets to create digital payment records in a repeatable process.
A major North American company, with about 30 GW of solar and wind projects, uses land management software to automatically import production and sales data to generate production royalties. The company runs the sales and production numbers through calculation spreadsheets attached to each lease to auto-calculate what each payee should receive. By incorporating spreadsheets into the land records database, payments are created automatically, with all payment variables available for reporting and inclusion in payee remittance letters.
5. Streamlinelandowner communications
Acquiring and maintaining land
rights requires regular communication with landowners. Land management software should provide easy ways to record landowner communications, create letters, and let payees know how royalty payments are calculated.
One producer, with wind farms
in six states, uses its land system
to auto-generate payee remittance letters. For each wind farm, all the royalty payments for the quarter are processed with the click of a button. The system writes the payments to a history table, outputs a list of payment details that is consumed by accounting software, and automatically generates a letter to each payee that includes details about how the payment was calculated. These payment variables and their values are pulled directly from the database, and the letters are customized with the company logo and wind farm name.
The land management and GIS software you choose can affect how much time you spend inputting its data and extracting any actionable meaning from that data. The software should help you stay competitive
by providing diverse ways to view and manipulate information about land rights and facilities, without requiring database expertise.
Laura Holt is Manager, U.S. Software Operations for Pandell, which delivers Software-as-a-Services (SaaS) products and services to 500+ energy companies worldwide. Pandell’s cloud-hosted product suites help finance, land, and operations teams conduct business more effectively.
Pandell /// www.pandell.com
North American Clean Energy
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