Lease Accounting Software – Why companies are switching solutions
The transition to the new lease accounting standards brought leases into focus for the office of finance, often for the first time – and it was a huge project to take on. Many companies selected a lease accounting solution under the pressure of a looming reporting requirement and now, several years later, are running into system limitations and accounting challenges that add up over time – and get in the way as they look to get more from their lease portfolio.
We usually see companies looking to switch for a few reasons:
- They discovered their existing software applied accounting treatments improperly, resulting in incorrect entries, account balances or disclosures
- They’re tired of wasting time on inefficient workflows and workarounds outside the system to prepare things like roll forward reports and disclosures
- They’re looking to analyze their entire lease portfolio in one system of record – including non-material assets – not just for compliance purposes, but for better financial and operational decisions. Some lease accounting-focused systems manage non-material assets separately, making it hard to get the full picture.
- They’re looking for their solution to do more than just lease accounting and compliance. Beyond dates and dollars, companies are now looking to manage and optimize obligations, risk, costs and other key metrics and workflows – including sustainability metrics and climate impact with new global sustainability reporting requirements. That requires tools built to handle the complexities of lease information and workflows and the flexibility to make those tools work for the unique needs of your business.
It’s Easy to Start Fresh in Visual Lease
We’ve helped hundreds of companies over the years make the switch to Visual Lease, both from spreadsheets and other solutions in the market. There’s two top challenges that clients consistently tell us are the hardest part:
- Importing (and usually, organizing) documents – not just lease agreements and addendums, but things like floor plans, insurance certificates, service contracts, utility bills and more. Most of our clients have at least a few documents they want to reference for each lease – and that gets cumbersome to manage the bigger the portfolio
- Migrating (and often correcting) account balances and lease accounting schedules
We’ve launched two new solutions to tackle them.
Introducing Document Manager
Document Manager makes it easy to upload and manage documents across your portfolio, allowing users to upload leases, insurance certifications, service contracts, floor plans – and anything else you need to reference to run your portfolio.
With document manager, you can upload hundreds of files at a time, organize them centrally, and associate them to lease records all in one place.
This is already saving customers time – and not just during implementation. One client, a Fortune 500 Company, said,
“Beyond implementation, we’re finding this functionality very useful for our lease abstraction workflow. As we onboard our external lease abstraction firm, this allows us to save time uploading, organizing, and assigning all our relevant documents and collaborate with our abstractors without needing to provide them access to our internal databases.”
Introducing Point-in-Time Transfer
For companies migrating to Visual Lease from excel or an existing solution, we have two new ways to build out their schedules from the time they move to VL rather than the commencement date of their lease. That means there’s no need to rebuild historical accounting scenarios – simply import your lease details, enter your account balances, determine your discount rate and specify the financial entry treatment and start fresh in Visual Lease.
- For bulk uploads, the Account Balance Import Template auto-populates lease information and allows users to import all the key data needed to build out lease accounting schedules going forward.
- For one-off schedule builds – or scenarios where users need to create multiple schedules on a single lease record, a new UI wizard guides users through each step, ensuring a smooth transition.
Both tools give users the option to automatically generate a true-up entry in the cases where discrepancies show up in liability calculations resulting in a hanging balance. The UI wizard even allows customers to preview the hanging balance, giving users the option to make an informed decision before generating the true-up entry.
Accelerated Implementations in Visual Lease
Migrating to a new lease accounting software can seem daunting, especially with a large portfolio and lots of active leases. But Visual Lease makes the process as painless as possible with powerful automation, dedicated implementation support, award-winning customer success resources and a global network of certified implementation, advisory, and accounting partners to ensure your system migration is successful.
Just getting started? Explore how our software integrates with your existing systems and discover the possibilities.
Explore how we integrate with your tech stack → —
Weighing your options?
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Ready to move? Get in touch with our team to discuss your specific needs and start your seamless transition.
