Top 7 Lease Accounting Mistakes and How to Solve Them

At the end of 2021, the Financial Accounting Standard Board (FASB) rolled out new rules for lease accounting. There have been many new additions that any property manager needs to notice. A proper lease accounting process can help your real estate business keep track of financial impacts on the company due to lease works. Since leases are filled with complicated legal matters and are full of cumbersome paperwork, they can become an enormous burden for a business owner. This tedious process ends up with a lot of mistakes that businesses commit that can end up in major problems in the future.  

Read the full blog to know what these mistakes are and how you can avoid them. 

Mistakes in your lease accounting work disrupt your company's cash flow, burden the finance departments and shake up the regular workflow of the business. Most companies and real estate property managers depend on inexperienced in-house reassigned from other departments to somehow get the job done. This can lead to a lot of data inaccuracy, fraud, lack of budgeting and forecasting, and inability to keep up with compliances. You need to work with experts to solve these issues and avoid long-drawn legal battles with the FASB.  

Companies have been battling with lease administration and accounting work for quite some time now. We have handled this work for clients for a while now. Here are a few of the top mistakes and oversights we saw through years of experience. Keep track of these to avoid them and benefit your business.  

If you do not have a proper data collection system in your real estate business, that is a major hindrance. Having gaps in data order and not getting your lease abstraction on time can make you fall short on lease accounting work and affect your finances. You need to start working with a third-party lease abstraction services provider to get through the process on time.  

If you do not follow a company standard guideline for your lease agreements then your lease accounting work will suffer. As a real estate property manager and owner, you can not indulge in drawing up different kinds of lease agreements and rules for similar tenants. Not only does it puts a lot of burden on the financing department to keep track it also creates a bad brand image with the tenants.  

If you do not put down your CAM rules, regulations, and charges in the lease agreement, lease accounting can never be completely worked out. CAM reconciliation is a crucial step of the whole process to close your books on time and tie up all loose ends. You can not take your tenants by surprise by adding up new CAM charges while doing the lease accounting work, you need to put them in place from the beginning of the deal. This will help all stakeholders be on the same page and get work done on time. 

The FASB rules and guidelines are ever-changing. As a property manager, you may not have the expertise to understand the legal jargon inside the fine print of these rules. But these rules need to be complied with during all lease accounting work to avoid any penalties and legal fines. Staying up to date with these and modifying your lease accordingly is crucial for growth and keeping your business functions stable.  

Only an expert in lease accounting is always updated about FASB rule changes, and you need to hire one to make the job seamless. Following a DIY process will open your company might save some money up to a lot of risks, which can end up in a lot more monetary loss. If you do not want to invest in employing the experts full-time, you can always go for outsourced services with third-party providers. You need to audit your lease and check for any faulty areas, and you also need financial service experts to check if all the terms of the lease are benefitting all stakeholders. 

Keeping up with compliances is never a one-time thing. You need to set up a streamlined process to handle the situation. This will help you get proper data insights, stay on top of industry developments and news and avoid all blocks. Lease data management proves to be cost-effective and gives companies a lot of valuable information about their financial conditions and current happenings. It will also help you optimize your lease payments and never be on the wrong side of compliances.  

Before you reach lease accounting, you need to lease extraction work to be done in order to get scalable and comprehensible data to work with. This can be done with the help of the right technology selection in project management. The right software can fasten your workflow by processing all the data in no time and helps in keeping up with all deadlines. Completely depending on manual labor to get the job done can be harmful to your ROI in the long run.