I would greatly appreciate any recommendations on record keeping - I have multiple file cabinets with Correspondence, Deeds, Leases, Division Orders and Commission Documents for many counties but don’t feel like it’s a good, concise system.
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You can observe qualified professionals (often with localized expertise) who provide services to mineral owners right here on The Mineral Rights Forum. You will notice them in 3 different places on the site:
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in display image ads and text links on site
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in our Mineral Service Provider Directory in the main navigation bar above. These are arranged by professional discipline.
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as a Business Member within many conversations throughout the site Look for the blue colored “B” on their picture and blue colored text).
These practitioners are often able to provide specific (and often localized) services that meet your needs.
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Paper, paper paper. It gets to us all.
In the event you’ve got assets enough that may support having a mineral management company look over your stuff, consider that. As part of the program, direct them to digitize all you have (with a pre agreed upon organizitaitonal structure and file naming conventions). Make sure up front that your data is 100% retrievable and portable enough that you can leave at any time. Of course, they’re going to have to make sure it’s all worth their time with some sort of minimum length contract and/or you pay them up front for the time to get it all organized, then go forward.
In short, is it time to get professional help.
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I highly recommend converting to a digital system. I use a Google Workspace Business account along with Google Drive, but you can get started with a personal gmail account with expanded Google Drive storage. A good home office scanner will cost around $400 (ScanSnap IX2500).
Then start with a nested folder design in Drive, something like State/County/Property Name. If you do not have a great number of documents, then start with a naming convention such as Company_DO_YYY-MM-DD. DO is for Division Order, but you can use COM for Communications, OGL, DEED, and so on. If you are only in one State, then no need for the State folder.
Start another nested folder for checks Revenue/Year. Some people like to break this down further by Company, but I find that is too granular. Same naming convention Company_CK_YYYY-MM-DD.
You can do the same thing with many of the online Drive services or on your PC/Mac. This system will replace your file cabinets. There is no need to keep expired DO’s or other outdated documents, but this sytem will easily handle those items also.
If you do not have a CRM, maintain a Google docs file in each property or county folder for any research or contact information. This is only a start. You can go as granular as you want with a system of this nature. Good luck to you.
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Geologist here. I file by geographic location since everything goes back to where is it located. State, County, township, range, section, deed description. (or Block, Abstract, Section for Texas)
I gave a talk at the Texas NARO Convention in July on how to organize your files- Clay Tablets to Digital world. Let me know if you want a copy with some ideas of how to structure your files. Do what works for you.
I do save everything digitally. Our paper files are organized to match our digital files. I hope to shred the old paper ones someday, but just can’t quite do it yet. I like to touch things! Old Division Orders seem to be needed as new operators pop up on wells and don’t get the decimals right for old wells.
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Martha, I would love a copy of your ideas.
Hello M Barnes
I would like a copy of your ideas on how to structure files, Thank you
You can do a file directory structure, but you will need to settle on a naming scheme. M_Barnes files by geographic location. I file by a directory structure of Operator/Year/OperatorName-StatementType-Year-Month.
If you are have sufficient amounts of time, nerdiness, and are just plain crazy, you can try setting up a document management system. I am using Paperless-NGX, but it is cumbersome to set up and is a big do-it-yourself project. There are hosted options where a company attempts to make that easy such as Managed Paperless-ngx Service | Elest.io, but I have not used that company and it has a monthly fee. The advantage of something like paperless-ngx is after scanning a document it can automatically recognize the text and then tags the document with relevant information, such as operator, date, type of statement, etc. If you want, you can attach multiple “tags” to a document. For instance, you could tag the document with the geographic location. That way, you can search by statement type and well location, and it can give you a list of all those documents organized by year and operator.
I have also tried File Center ( Paperless Office Software for Any Office | FileCenter DMS ). It is a bit more limited than paperless, but much easier to set up and understand, and is fairly affordable. It is a program that runs on your computer, so it is not accessible from a website like Google Docs. It also does text recognition (not perfect though) so you can potentially search files by key words if you want to look for something specific.
If you receive statements of EnergyCrap (I am sorry, Energy Link), they lock the pdf files to prevent copying text so they can entice you to pay more. It is pointlessly stupid. All you do is print the statement then scan it (or just directly print to pdf again!) to be able to perform text recognition.
Any which way, if you are doing it electronically, make sure you have some software to back up all those files (not a cloud drive, an actual backup solution).
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Be aware that EL has a copyright statement about their pdfs and sharing prohibitions.
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Thank you, that’s great informative information!
Consider varying the naming scheme based on the type of file and purpose. An operator directory is is particularly relevant for revenue related data. However, the operator can change over time and then you will have multiple files related to well and royalty data or need to have a link. Geographic is particularly useful saving title related documents and information, such as deeds, mineral information, leases, land records, pooling etc. Multi-sectional horizontal wells can overlap mineral tracts. There are often multiple operators in the same lands, under different leases and formations / depths.I like to separate well files, lease files, title data and royalty data. There is no one-size-fits-all, particularly as the data volume increases.
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I use Copper CRM to manage my communications, research notes, tasks, and relevant files. In addition to all of my contacts and companies, I added a Pipeline for mineral properties. A Copper Pipeline are data records. This takes some modest setup, but once it is done you can relate mineral property information to various companies and contacts. If you use the Google Chrome Browser, then there is an Copper Chrome Extension that is very helpful. Copper is deeply integrated with Google so Gmail is recorded in Copper and you can relate Google Drive files. Copper Starter costs $10/Mo which can use a free Gmail account. I use the Basic tier in Copper for $23/Mo. If you only have a few properties and not many contacts, then stay with a nested folder design and a spreadsheet. This simplified system can list the property description in the spreadsheet and have a URL link to the relevant folder for the property.
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