This story is drawn from a session Devon Energy led at the Enverus EVOLVE conference. Watch their on-demand session here.
The Short Version
A lot of field spend in upstream oil and gas still starts with a paper ticket and a manual signature, which forces approvers to sign twice, slows vendor payment, and lets invoices drift from the agreements behind them. This piece looks at how one operator digitized field ticketing and AFE approvals, capturing the financial authority signature once at the ticket level, and what that changed for cycle time, invoice coding, and field safety.
A lot of field spend in upstream oil and gas still starts with a paper ticket and a manual signature, which forces approvers to sign twice, slows vendor payment, and lets invoices drift from the agreements behind them. This piece looks at how one operator digitized field ticketing and AFE approvals, capturing the financial authority signature once at the ticket level, and what that changed for cycle time, invoice coding, and field safety.
On most active leases, a surprising amount of spend still starts with a paper ticket and a signature. A service crew finishes a job, writes up a ticket, and someone has to physically sign it. Sometimes that means a vendor flagging down an approver on a lease road to get a piece of paper stamped. Sometimes it means the approver printing the ticket, signing it, scanning it back in, and emailing it along. The cost coding gets added by hand somewhere in that chain, and the packet eventually becomes an invoice that an accounting team has to reconcile against what was actually approved in the field.
This is how a lot of field ticketing still works, and it’s especially common on AFE work, where the spend is authorized against a specific project and the approvals carry real weight. The manual version quietly taxes everyone it touches. Approvers give the same signature twice, once on paper in the field and again when the invoice lands. Vendors also wait longer to get paid, and every hand-written code is one more place an invoice can drift from the agreement behind it. Across tens of thousands of tickets a month, that adds up to slower cycle times, slower cash, and the occasional safety problem when someone has to be tracked down in person to sign.
How Do Operators Get Field Ticketing Off Paper?
Devon Energy took this on with its AFE work. Crews were still signing tickets in the field by hand, adding the cost coding manually, and sending the packet on to the vendor. Devon had already moved other categories, like water hauling and disposal, onto an Enverus digital field ticketing solution, but their AFE spend was the largest remaining category still on paper. So, the team decided it was time to digitize it.
The technology aspect wasn’t the hard part though. The harder job was persuading field managers who had run this process the same way for years, and that came down to a straightforward, practical case: capture the signature once, electronically, at the point the work is approved.
You can reduce your work, because you take that manual signature, put it in the system, and that’s your financial authority signature now. You’re no longer doing it in two different spots.
— Nick Hise, Manager, Expenditure Accounting, Devon Energy
The old way asked approvers to sign twice, once to authorize the work and again when the invoice showed up. Capturing the financial authority signature at the ticket level folds those into a single step: approve it once, where the work happens, and it does not come back around downstream. There is a safety benefit too. When approvals happen electronically, vendors no longer have to track people down on remote lease roads to get a ticket signed, which can be genuinely dangerous.
What Does Rolling Out Digital Field Ticketing Take?
Digitizing the tickets was one thing, but getting hundreds of approvers and vendors onto the system on a tight timeline was another. Devon moved its business units onto AFE ticketing on a compressed schedule and made it stick with a simple idea: office hours. The team ran dedicated call-in sessions before and after go-live, where anyone could ask a question live rather than adding another email to the queue.
It’s much quicker to answer something in a live call than to have the same question come in ten times and answer those in emails. We dedicated a lot of time to pre-go-live and post-go-live office hours.
— Megan Belcher, Lead AP Accountant, Devon Energy
A useful pattern showed up in those sessions. Many vendors called in only to confirm that Devon was not using the system differently from everyone else, because they were already on it for other operators. Onboarding became less about teaching a new tool and more about confirming that Devon worked the way the vendor already did. That is a quieter advantage of a widely adopted ticketing network, and it is not something an operator can create on its own.
What it Makes Possible
Moving field spend off paper doesn’t just mean removing the physical ticket itself from the work being done, it’s more about removing or simplifying all the manual touches that paper tickets create down the line. With AFE work captured electronically at the ticket level, approvers stop signing twice, vendors stop chasing signatures across the lease, and the coded ticket flows straight into the invoice instead of being reassembled after the fact. Some field situations will always call for a light signature or a stamp, so this is not about removing every human step. It is about removing the ones that existed only because the work lived on paper.
If your field and AFE spend still runs on manual signatures and hand-written coding, the takeaway from Devon’s experience is a practical one. The tools to digitize this work have been around for years. The harder and more valuable move is deciding to stop signing the same ticket twice, and then putting in the time to bring the field and the vendors along.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is AFE work in oil and gas?
- AFE stands for Authorization for Expenditure. AFE work is field activity charged against an approved budget for a specific project or well, so the approvals and cost coding tied to it carry significant financial weight.
Why is manual field ticketing still a problem?
- When field tickets are signed on paper and coded by hand, approvers often sign twice, vendors wait longer to be paid, and invoices can diverge from the agreements behind them. At scale, that means slower cycle times, slower cash, and added safety risk when signatures have to be collected in person.
What is a financial authority signature?
- It is the approval that authorizes spend at the point the work is accepted. Capturing it electronically at the ticket level means the same signature does not have to be given again when the invoice arrives.
How does digitizing field tickets reduce invoice coding work?
- When a coded, approved ticket flows straight into the invoice, far fewer invoices need manual coding or review downstream. The accounting team can focus on the exceptions that fall out rather than touching every document.
