Lease portfolios often account for a massive portion of a company’s risk exposure and overhead. And yet, most businesses lack visibility into their leases to understand their obligations and options – and make agile decisions as their businesses grow.
There are several reasons for this:
Leases are complex, constantly evolving agreements with high-stakes terms often buried in the contracts. Managing leases can be difficult due to data silos and distributed responsibilities across operations, real estate and accounting teams. This means there’s a lot of room for crossed wires, missed deadlines and costly mistakes.
Lease accounting compliance brought the pressing need for lease portfolio management to light. When FASB announced ASC 842, several solutions flooded the market to solve this problem. However, not all of them could.
Technology that attempts to do it all (lease administration, business intelligence, accounts payable, etc.) generally does not. Often, efficiencies promised within all-in-one solutions are lost to mediocre functionality and execution. This is especially true in a software category as new as lease accounting.
The stakes are too high to take chances. Companies require specialized lease administration and accounting tools, and they need those tools to seamlessly integrate into their processes and technology stacks at each stage of the lease lifecycle.
How to Optimize the Lease Lifecycle
From sourcing to contract negotiation to termination, there’s a lot that goes into the lifecycle of the lease – and each stage is dependent on the last.
- Procurement decisions are better when you have informed analytics on asset utility.
- Lease accounting reports are better when you have all your lease management information centralized and accessible.
- It’s easier to manage your leases when you can easily reference important clauses and deadlines embedded in contracts.
There are countless software and service providers dedicated to streamlining every stage of a lease. But they can only maintain accuracy if data flows between them securely, automatically and asynchronously.
With the right solution for each facet of your business and a secure, flexible tech stack, companies can leverage their leased properties and equipment as strategic financial assets vs. overhead expenses.
Integrations are the key to connect those solutions, drive efficiency and unlock insights and financial opportunity.
Introducing the Integrations Hub, a powerful new way to automate workflows, unlock insights and achieve end-to-end compliance across your lease portfolio and your business.
The Integrations Hub offers flexible, open platform access to any third-party application. Users can simply schedule, monitor, manage and automate data imports and exports to and from Visual Lease at any time. (Think of it as a lease lifecycle electrical socket, allowing you to supercharge your tech stack with a simple plug-in.)
Given the complexity and often customized configurations in accounting technology, a one-size-fits-all API isn’t enough. We believe there is no such thing as a silver bullet integration – whether it’s built by us or anyone else.
With the Integrations Hub you’ve got more options to leverage your lease data, including:
- Low-maintenance Managed File Transfers for schedule automated data imports and exports
- An accessible Developer Portal with a comprehensive REST API Library enabling customized, real-time data connectors. With just a few lines of code, a developer can access accurate data along with powerful and complex processes in a repeatable way.
- Track every transfer in real-time with the integrations hub Dashboard to cat ensure data integrity and auditability.
It’s all backed by the industry’s most informed and experienced professional services team.
Imagine the possibilities:
- Align every line in your general ledger by connecting journal entries from Visual Lease or tracking payment information in accounts payable.
- Convert currencies across continents by plugging in currency rate tables to Visual Lease for always-accurate calculations, no matter the location.
- Inform Business Intelligence by surfacing the right data at the right time in the system and format where it’s most helpful.
The technology team at Newmark was instrumental in helping us build and test this new technology, and they’re already using the Integrations Hub to leverage lease data across their tech stack.
Newmark is a Visual Lease customer and a leading commercial real estate firm that provides a fully integrated platform of services to prominent multinational corporations and institutional investors across the globe.
The technology team at Newmark was instrumental in helping us build and test this new technology, and they’re already using the Integrations Hub to connect lease data to their Business Intelligence tool, NavigatorCRE.
According to Carla Hinson, Newmark’s Executive Managing Director, Global Technology, this opens up possibilities.
At our live launch event, Hinson sat down with Bobby Paulus, Visual Lease’s Director of Strategic Alliances, to talk through her experience getting Newmark’s integrations set up, the value they’re are already experiencing and what’s next on their roadmap. To listen to the full conversation, watch the event recording.
If you’re ready to supercharge your tech stack– and integrate your lease data across systems, we’re excited to help you get you plugged in. Check out this page on our website for more information.
