The ASC 842, GASB 87, and IFRS 16 accounting standards require operating leases to be recognized on the balance sheet in the form of right-of-use-assets and corresponding lease liabilities. Lease contracts have lots of nuances, conditions, and special scenarios, and lease transactions can result in literally hundreds of permutations and calculations throughout the year, which means you’ll need to maintain an audit trail for any modifications and subsequent remeasurements.

Spreadsheets aren’t designed to handle the dynamics and complexity that impact the accounting calculations, which means they’re prone to error and leaves you vulnerable to risk.

Lease accounting software automates journal entries, each lease’s audit trail and classification as a finance or operating lease, and centralizes the processes and lifecycles of lease portfolios, effectively managing and minimizing financial and operational risk.

Lease accounting software is a specialized solution designed to help companies manage their leases, implement internal controls, and streamline accounting while complying with the financial reporting requirements for leases set forth by the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and the Governmental Accounting Standards Boards (GASB).

The software typically automates the process of recording lease-related transactions, calculating and recognizing lease expenses and income, and producing financial reports and disclosures. It can be used to manage all types of leases, including real estate, equipment, and other assets. Lease accounting software helps companies reduce errors, increase efficiency, and ensure compliance with accounting standards. It also offers greater visibility into lease portfolios, enabling more informed decisions about leasing activities.

For the public sector, lease accounting software also offers accounting and reporting tools for subscription-based IT agreements to support compliance with GASB 96. This new guidance from the GASB is based on the guidance for GASB 87 for leases, ensuring that software agreements are recognized as ROU Assets and corresponding liabilities.

Lease controls fall into four main categories: Transition-related Controls, Financial Reporting Controls, Activity-related Controls, and IT General Controls. Internal controls should be established in two phases: during the transition and after its implementation.

Transition-related controls are short-term controls that focus on the transition period when implementing the new lease accounting standards, however, they have ongoing relevance after the transition period, and may need to be revisited if improperly implemented or policies change. These controls are designed to minimize risks related to:

• Identification of all leases and lease obligations
• Accuracy of scripts for reports and journal entries
• Accuracy and completeness of the recording of the adoption of the lease standard
• Accuracy and completeness of accounting conclusions

Financial reporting controls should cover:

• Additions to GAAP/Disclosure checklists related to ASC 842
• Changes to inserts/footnote disclosures for ASC 842 compliance
• Recalculation/review of data intensive elements, including weighted average calculations and variable lease payments
• Reconciliation of lease disclosures to related system reports

Activity related controls should cover:

• Standardization of data and documentation
• Identification of embedded leases
• Classification of operating vs. financing leases
• Timely identification of lease modifications.
• Review/approval of new leases and changes to leases
• Calculation/recording of leasehold assets and liabilities
• Safeguarding of assets

IT General Controls should cover:

• Completeness and accuracy of source data and system interfaces
• Review/approval through workflow management of changes to lease information
• Segregation of duties
• ITGC change management, logical access, and operations controls over the new leasing system
• Implementation of audit trail

Lease controls will look different at every organization depending on the people, processes, and technologies applied to the control environment, and you should work with your accounting advisor to implement policies and procedures to ensure a smooth audit.

To learn more about controls under the new lease accounting standards, read our blog: Mastering Lease Accounting Internal Controls: Unveiling the Key Categories for Compliance

Lease controls will look different at every organization, but software can help automate or enable both preventative and detective controls for lease accounting.

Standardization of Data and Documentation can help maintain consistent recordkeeping over time and make it easier to review past records when searching for the source of a discrepancy. The lack of standardization can cause items to be overlooked or misinterpreted in a search for discrepancies

Features to look for:

• Robust lease administration creates a single source of truth across teams and forces organizations to enter contracts and extract clauses in the same format and run calculations in a consistent way
• Import templates that automatically map to the system settings and configurations you decide on in implementation standardize data and streamline data entry

• Pre-built, third-party tested reports and calculations ensure consistency and accuracy.

Separation of duties defines roles across a transaction – who can start a transaction, who can review a transaction, who can approve a transaction, who can report on a transaction, reducing the risk of fraud and errors.

Ideally, no single person should have sole control over each step in the lifespan of a transaction. Separation of duties splits the responsibility for bookkeeping, deposits, reporting and auditing.

• Defined user profiles allow admins to define which contracts each user has access to and what actions they can take. -You’re should be- able to restrict access down to the lease level based on the filters that make sense to your org (region, department, org structure, etc.)

Authorizations and Approvals are combined features to enforce. Authorization is the power granted to an employee to perform a task while approval is the act of ensuring an activity is consistent with an organization’s rules and procedures.

The person who authorizes a transaction should be different from the person who approves it.-Any lease accounting system should allow admins to designate roles and approvers for each stage of a transaction while maintaining a detailed audit trail.

System access controls gate access to different parts of an accounting system via passwords, lockouts and electronic access logs can keep unauthorized users out of the system. It also provides a way to audit the usage of the system to identify the source of errors or discrepancies. Robust access tracking can also serve as a deterrent to fraudulent access in the first place. Look for an SSAE certification from any vendor, as well as features like defined user profiles, single sign-on and 2-factor authentication.

An audit trail is a sequential record detailing the history and events related to a specific transaction or ledger history. It provides a step-by-step record to trace accounting, trade details, or other financial data back to their source. Any lease accounting system should provide an audit trail for each lease, as well as reports like:

• Change Log Report – provides an audit trail of field changes to components of one or more lease records, tracking which user made each change and when, and the old and new values of each field.
• Disclosure report – should include a maturity analysis to understand the detailed transactions that justify the numbers in the disclosure to speed the audit.
  For a deeper dive into internal controls for lease accounting compliance, check out our blog: Mastering Lease Accounting Compliance: Top 7 Control Activities and How Technology Can Help

Lease accounting standards add to the complexity of reporting on assets and liabilities. The standards add real estate and equipment lease requirements and change how leases are classified, which in turn affects how leases are calculated on the balance sheet and reflected during your audit. Without a lease accounting solution to help with lease tracking, reporting and management, your business may be exposed to a number of risks including:

• Inconsistencies in the way assets are accounted for
• Human error in calculations or in migrating data from one source to another
• Widely dispersed lease records rather than a central data repository
• Lack of visibility into lease terms, changes and important dates
• Missing details such as embedded leases that are part of larger contracts

• Lack of a structured change management process
• Mistakes in complex calculations for common area maintenance (CAM) and other costs
• No record of what changes have been made to leases, when and by whom
• Increased odds of failing an audit

The best lease accounting software addresses all these risks and more. It puts a secure system in place for capturing all the necessary data, tracking changes and reporting lease costs in accordance with your accounting policies and procedures as well as with ASC, GASB or IFRS requirements.

Get more details in our blog:Lease accounting auditing risks multiply without software.

There are many reasons to adopt a lease accounting software solution, but the three most essential benefits combined can help your business grow, and protect it from risk.

Benefit 1: Improved productivity and efficiency
The best lease accounting software uses smart, intuitive system design to eliminate manual processes, therefore making it easy to accomplish tasks quickly.

Improving employee productivity is a KPI for just about every organization, regardless of size or industry. If your lease accounting tool is cumbersome and complicated to use, it will slow people down and hinder their work.

To test the time-saving value of a lease accounting software solution, consider the following:

• Does the system allow you to enter data once and use it throughout the system (rather than entering the same thing in multiple places)?

• Does the system support mass updates to different groups of assets such as based on entity, country, brand or asset class?
• Does the system support configurable alerts based on asset profile, or based on user groups?
• Does the system accept updates to master data in the administrative settings (such as GL codes) rather than having to pay for a vendor CR each time?

These four areas are just some of the key factors that impact how quickly and easily you can accomplish what you need to within your lease accounting software.

Benefit 2: Make better leasing decisions with lease accounting software
With all leases being brought onto the balance sheet, organizations — and their auditors — are taking a much closer look at leasing decisions. Can the lease accounting tool you’re considering help you make the most cost-effective choices?

For that, you need a central repository of all your lease data.

That’s why the most valuable enterprise lease accounting software aggregates data for real estate, equipment, vehicles, land and anything else your organization leases. It also should collect information used in the day-to-day administration of your leases, not just the payment amounts and dates.

For data to inform your decision making, you’ll also need powerful and flexible reporting and business intelligence tools. Look for the ability to roll up, drill down into the details and produce ad hoc reports that slice and dice your data exactly how you need it.

Benefit 3: Mitigate costly errors and risks
Lease accounting software can help reduce risk in two ways. First, inaccurate financial reports can cause you to fail an audit, which in itself is a huge risk. With lease accounting software’s centralized data and reporting, these risks can be mitigated. Second, lease management software (also called lease controller software) can help reduce the high financial risk that comes with a poorly managed leased portfolio.