By: Daniel Rowe
On a modern drilling pad in the Permian Basin, an operator can steer a horizontal well from a screen, monitor downhole conditions in real time, and adjust a completion schedule on the fly. Ask that same operator what one of those wells actually earned last month, and the answer often lives somewhere far less impressive: a stack of PDF statements, a spreadsheet built by a controller who left years ago, and an accounting export nobody has had time to reconcile.
That gap between field technology and back-office reality is the market Austin Williams has spent his career staring at. After sixteen years inside oil and gas accounting departments, the Texas-born accountant founded Upstream, a Dallas-Fort Worth firm whose platform, Upstream+, is built on a pointed claim.
“Upstream+ is not accounting software,” Williams says. “It is a central command center for oil and gas assets.”
The distinction matters more than it might sound. Accounting software is built for the accountant. It posts journal entries, runs the monthly close, and files the returns. It was never designed for the operator, the mineral owner, or the capital partner who needs to know right now whether lease operating expenses on a well are on trend, off trend, or quietly eating margin. Those users have historically had one option: ask the accounting department for a custom report, then wait.
Upstream+ approaches the problem from the decision-maker’s side of the desk. The platform bolts onto whatever accounting system a company already runs, from enterprise oil and gas suites down to QuickBooks, and unifies the data those systems hold. Users get a fully interactive lease operating statement that can be sliced down to the pumper, the producing formation, the API number, or the individual invoice. The platform is built around Williams’ belief that the Lease Operating Statement should serve as the operational hub where financial and operational data come together, rather than remaining a static accounting report. Budgets can be compared against actuals at the AFE level and drilled through to the underlying charge. A report writer lets an owner or manager answer their own questions without waiting in line, and custom dashboards track the metrics a specific operation cares about.
The design reflects a frustration Williams watched play out at every stop of his career. When well data is fragmented across accounting systems, spreadsheets, and email attachments, every question from a chief executive, a geologist, or a field manager becomes a small research project. An accountant has to stop closing the books, export data, rebuild it by hand, and send back a one-off answer that is stale almost as soon as it lands. “A full week of strategic work becomes a full week of explaining bills,” Williams says.
The platform’s origin story is unusually literal. As a young revenue accountant at Pioneer Natural Resources in 2009, Williams built a side spreadsheet simply to check the output of an aging AS400 system whose reports he found unreadable. He kept refining that workbook through roles at Trey Resources, Wagner, Overton Park, and Strawn, and later while helping build the outsourcing practice at consulting firm Embark, adapting it to every accounting system and every operator question he encountered along the way.
By the time he founded his own firm in 2024, something curious had happened. Clients were hiring the company for outsourced accounting, but the tool had become the one thing that truly set the firm apart. The turning point came in late 2025, when Williams stopped treating the workbook as a free client perk and rebuilt it as Upstream+, a decision command center. The push came from the person closest to his work. His wife pointed out over the kitchen table that the tool he kept giving away was the reason clients kept coming back.
The timing tracks with two pressures reshaping the industry’s back offices. The first is staffing. Experienced oil and gas accountants are retiring faster than they are being replaced, and the specialty is niche enough that generalist accountants rarely step in. Lean teams are doing the work of larger ones, which leaves little time for analysis. The second is transaction volume. Wells change hands constantly through divestitures, acquisitions, and recapitalizations, and the operating history rarely travels with the asset.
“The new owner gets a folder of PDFs and Excel workbooks,” Williams says. “Almost never the operating history at the well level. Almost never the trend data that would let them make a real decision in their first ninety days.” He says he has watched operators spend $100,000 to $200,000 on accounting services simply to reconstruct their own asset history after a purchase. Upstream+ is built to export a well’s full operating history as one structured upload, so the data moves when the asset does.
The company is also developing automation for non-operated interest owners, a corner of the market that still runs heavily on paper. Non-op investors and mineral owners receive joint interest billings and revenue statements as PDFs, which then have to be typed into spreadsheets line by line before tax season. Upstream+ is working towards converting those statement stacks into uploadable data files in minutes rather than days, drawing on sixteen years of experience working with statement formats.
The business model is deliberately unflashy. On the services side, Upstream bills fixed fees rather than hourly rates, a stance Williams frames as a matter of principle. “You sign a number, and that is the number,” he says. For Upstream+, pricing is designed to encourage adoption rather than maximize short-term margins, part of a stated ambition to make the platform the standard interactive lease operating statement for the industry.
According to the company, more than forty independent producers, non-operators, and private-equity-backed operators work with Upstream today, and the firm co-sources more than four thousand well operations across its client base.
Whether Upstream+ becomes an industry standard or simply a very useful tool for its clients, the thesis behind it is difficult to argue with. An industry that mastered horizontal drilling still, in many offices, makes million-dollar decisions from static spreadsheets. Williams is betting the next competitive edge won’t be found beneath the surface. It will come from finally making sense of the information already sitting above it.
More information about the platform is available on the Upstream+ website, and Williams shares his industry commentary on LinkedIn.
