Welcome to General Lease import template training with VLU. This course is designed to give you a better understanding of the General Lease import template used within the VL import tool. We will also cover best practices and tips for completing this template to ensure a smooth upload of data.

By the end of this course, you should be able to:

• Navigate to the General Lease Import Template
• Complete the fields for the template
• and Understand the best practices for completing this template

Please take a moment to review the agenda. To view a particular topic, please jump to the corresponding timestamp.

Common Imports: General Lease

In this video, we will complete a General Lease Information template and show you some best practices when completing import.

Visual Lease offers a plethora of import options, but there are some that are used more often than others. Specifically, the Primary and Secondary Import Templates. The General lease import template falls under the Primary template category and is important to the main lease information upload steps.

To begin, click the tools icon in the main menu, then click Import lease information. Once on the page, find the General Lease Information template, located within the primary import template section.

This Basic Lease Information Importer can be used to both add new lease records and update existing ones. As this video is dedicated to new lease record creation, that is where our focus will be.

First, click on the link for General Information. A new tab in your browser will open.

Please ensure that you review the detailed instructions and important notes prior to using this template. This will help to ensure a smooth and successful import.

Next, click the hyperlink to download the pre-formatted Excel template. Please note, selecting a lease filter from the dropdown will prepopulate matching leases from VL into the downloaded template. This is how the support or CSM teams would recommend making updates to the general tab in bulk. Since we are creating brand new lease records, we will leave this blank to download a new blank template.

The columns within the template mirror the fields found on the general tab of your platform. As mentioned earlier, Visual Lease color codes all templates to easily distinguish between required, optional, and criteria dependent fields. Additionally, some template fields may not be in use on your platform. Be sure to review the template key and instructions found here for more information.

It is important that you do not manipulate, move, or delete any columns or tabs within this file, even if they are not in use. This will cause the import to fail.

The reference tabs along the bottom of the worksheet provide you with a list of accepted values for specific columns within the template.

Think about the steps to create new lease records in the platform. Often you must select from a predetermined list of drop downs or tree fields, based on the configuration of your platform. The same is true here.

These tabs are broken into numerous categories including:

– basic values, like lease status, owner type, and currency
– Record types
– Organizations
– Region
– Brand
– And country with state or province

We strongly recommend copying from the reference tabs and pasting into the Lease General tab to avoid typos, errors, or hanging spaces at the beginning or end of a word – as these will result in import errors.

Once you have finished populating the template with the details of the leases you are uploading, save the file and return to the platform. Click the Browse button to locate the saved file and click “Open” to load it into the import tool. Once loaded, click Upload and Process to complete the import.

You do not need to select the “Update Lease Financials for Expiration Date changes” checkbox as this setting only applies when you are updating existing leases.

How about demoing how to use the template to update leases here?

Select a lease filter to download a prepopulated import template. Update the templates as need

Detail the expected behavior of the Update lease financials flag
The import results will be displayed under the Results section. Here, you will see a summary of actions taken as a result of the import including: the number of rows that were processed, unchanged, updated, inserted, and those with errors.

If you use the import tool to add 18 new lease records to your platform, your results should display 18 rows inserted.

The template treats each row as an individual upload. This means only rows that have errors have not uploaded.

Review the error summary here to identify the lease IDs that contain an error and the error message. Open your saved template to correct the leases with errors and re-upload as needed.

If the upload is successful, there will be no errors.
The new lease records are now available in your platform.

If you are unsure of the error, please do not hesitate to take a screen shot or the exported file to support for assistance.

Tips and Tricks

In this video, we will cover some best practices, as well as some tips and tricks to ensure a smooth import of the General Lease template.

When completing the General Lease import template, there are things that should be taken into consideration.

Here are some best practices and tips for completing the General Lease Information template are as follows:

• First, it’s important to copy and paste from the reference tabs to the general import tab. This ensures there are no misspellings or extra spaces in the field when they are inputted.
• Next, it’s important that you need to copy and paste the record types from the ‘Record Type’ column on the reference tab, not the description column
• In the currency section on the Basic Lookup Table, the first currency listed is ‘United States Dollar’. All other currencies are in alphabetical order.
• The Original Commencement Date is intended to capture the lease’s initial start date, the Commencement Date may be the same if this is a net new lease. The Commencement Date will have downstream financial and accounting implications and should house the lease’s current term start date
• The expiration Date is conditionally required, because if the Owner Type is ‘Owned’ there is technically no end date, but to avoid downstream errors on financial entries, we recommend always listing an expiration date – consider using 12/31/2099 as the end for Owned leases
• Rentable area is a numerical field only! The minimum value accepted is 1. 0 is not an acceptable number

– When completing a non-real estate record in the platform, it does not require the rentable area Measurement Unit or Land Unit is not required, but the import template does require this to be entered in order to successfully upload a non-real estate record.

Key Takeaways

This concludes the training for the General Lease import template.

Here’s some key things to remember:

• Always Follow the instructions on the template page
•  Never change or any of the column header names
• Always copy & paste from the reference tab to the template
•  If the owner type is “owned”, enter 12/31/2099 to avoid errors when uploading. If you are unsure of the error, please do not hesitate to take a screen shot or the exported file to support for assistance

Thanks for watching. Any questions, comments, or feedback can be sent to support@visuallease.com