Software is now available from the Minerals Management Service to allow industry to use computers for monthly sales reporting. The software is being offered to oil and natural gas reporters at no cost. This is the latest in a series of MMS innovations to streamline and make agency processes more efficient.

The template for the Report of Sales and Royalty Remittance, Form MMS-2014, offers extensive on-line help and incorporates an MMS edit routine that will ease preparation of royalty sales reports, reduce reporting errors and lower costs associated with manually entering the data.

Reporters will be allowed to report sales data via electronic mail or diskette. The software also retains the last saved report for reference and automatically transfers reference data, thereby eliminating the need to reenter unchanged information from month to month.

"Like the software MMS introduced last year for production reporting, this is a user-friendly option to paper reporting," said MMS Director Cynthia Quarterman. "It makes the work more convenient, efficient and less susceptible to error, both for the reporter and for MMS. This innovation is one more step towards our goal of 100 percent electronic reporting."

Companies interested in the new software and other electronic reporting options are invited to contact MMS at 1-800-525-7922.

Other electronic reporting options for both the production and royalty reports include Electronic Data Interchange, Comma-Separated Values, ASCII and magnetic tape.