By: Mark McDonald, President CoStar Real Estate Manager and Visual Lease

Six months ago, Visual Lease joined the CoStar Group to bring together two market leaders in lease lifecycle management—and we’ve made that decision with full clarity on what makes each platform successful.

To be clear, our approach is not about consolidation. It’s about amplifying the strengths of each solution to create even more value for our customers – without disrupting what already works.

That excites us, and we hope it excites you as well. In Visual Lease, we see a proven solution that will only grow stronger and more capable.

So, what does that mean for VL customers now and in the future?

The Visual Lease you trust – now backed by the power of CoStar

What’s new is Visual Lease now has the scale and support of CoStar Group – a global leader in real estate technology and data – with the resources and commitment to drive more innovation and dream bigger.

Here’s what that means:

• Additional product investment – By joining the CoStar family, Visual Lease now has access to the power of the company’s technology, research and development teams, which work with big data, ground-breaking analytics,AI models and research to continually build new tools that shape the commercial real estate market.
• Solutions powered by the world’s largest lease dataset – CoStar Data is in a class of its own – and that means CoStar Group companies are in a unique position to deliver the most powerful data tools and AI models in the market. As part of the CoStar ecosystem, Visual Lease now will be able to integrate market intelligence and benchmarking that simply wasn’t possible before—creating opportunities for smarter decision-making in the future.
• A better experience for joint customers – VL customers who use CoStar Data will ultimately leverage lease management tools, alongside strategic insights, to help you optimize decision-making with more efficiency.

Already moving: VL product and partner momentum

Since the acquisition closed, we’ve hit the ground running. These are just a few highlights from the last six months:

Visual Lease was named a Workday Innovation partner.   With the launch of our integration with Workday, automating the bi-directional exchange of critical financial data points, while maintaining controls and ensuring compliance with ASC 842, IFRS 16, FRS 102, and GASB 97/96 standards.

Our new Document Manager module makes document management across the portfolio even easier, allowing customers to centrally upload, assign, and manage leases, insurance documents, service contracts, floor plan and anything else.

Our new Point-in-Time Transfer Tools accelerate implementations for companies migrating to Visual Lease, automatically generating accounting schedules without the need to rebuild historical accounting scenarios for accurate entries – one-off or at scale.

 

What the acquisition means for you

We’re supporting both solutions in parallel – There are no changes to existing contracts, your support team, or the core experience you rely on.

We’re continuing to invest in innovation – Our roadmap continues to be guided by customer feedback, regulatory needs, and our long-term product vision to combine market leading lease management and accounting tools with real estate market intelligence. Our focus is on earning your trust by listening closely, building responsibly, and helping you meet the evolving demands of lease accounting and real estate management.

We’re committed to stability – Customers can continue operating confidently on the platforms they know and trust.

 

Looking ahead, with flexibility and focus

We’re still in the early innings of what’s possible together. There may be places where we can create even more value across the Visual Lease and CoStar Real Estate Manager ecosystems: data, services, integrations, tech partnerships and reporting.

But we’re not making assumptions—and we’re not rushing changes.

Our product direction will continue to be grounded in what our customers need, not in consolidation for its own sake. Visual Lease remains an actively-supported platform. We’ll continue to evolve it to meet the demands of finance and real estate leaders — wherever those demands take us.

If you’re considering a new provider for lease management and accounting, we’d love to show you what Visual Lease can do for your portfolio.

Schedule a Demo with our team >

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?

See what goes into making the switch →

Ready to move? Get in touch with our team to discuss your specific needs and start your seamless transition.

Request a meeting with our team → 

Lease audit procedures are necessary for an efficient, successful audit. At their core, lease audit procedures ensure your organization has controlled processes in place to support its financial reports.

Having such procedures enable auditors to get their job done quickly due to reliable, clearly stated and followed controls. The more organized and prepared you are, the more likely you will avoid running into issues within your audit.

Not only do lease audit procedures better prepare you for an upcoming audit, but lease audit procedures can also provide additional business benefits through supporting optimization of your lease portfolio. Below, we dive into how lease audit procedures can help your business.

6 Lease Audit Assertions

Completeness

Completeness in lease accounting ensures that all leases and lease-related transactions are accurately identified, recorded, and reported in the financial statements. This means that a company must maintain a comprehensive record of every lease agreement, whether for real estate, equipment, or other assets.

Internal controls should ensure that no lease is overlooked and that all relevant transactions, including modifications, renewals, and terminations, are accounted for. This completeness is important for accurate financial reporting and compliance with accounting standards, as any missing lease could lead to misstatements in the company’s financial position.

Existence/Occurrence

The existence and occurrence assertion makes sure that all lease-related assets and liabilities reported in the financial statements genuinely exist and that the transactions have occurred. This is important because companies must provide evidence that it holds the right to use leased assets and has incurred the corresponding obligations.

Internal audit controls should verify that lease contracts are valid and enforceable, and that lease payments have been made or are payable as reported. This ensures that the leases recorded in the financial statements are legitimate and not the result of errors or fraud.

Valuation/Allocation

Valuation and allocation focus on ensuring that lease-related assets and liabilities are accurately valued and correctly allocated in the financial statements. This involves calculating the right-of-use (ROU) asset and lease liability based on the lease’s present value and ensuring that depreciation, amortization, and interest are correctly applied.

Any errors in valuation could distort the company’s financial health. Auditors assess whether these amounts have been calculated using appropriate discount rates and whether any lease incentives, like rent abatements or tenant improvement allowances, have been properly accounted for.

Cut-off

Cut-off refers to the proper timing of lease transaction recording, ensuring that they are reported in the correct accounting period. This is particularly important when leases are modified, terminated, or renewed, as incorrect cut-off dates can lead to inaccuracies in financial statements.

Auditors examine whether transactions are recorded when the lease’s control or obligation transfers to the lessee, aligning the financial statements with the company’s true financial position at the reporting date.

Rights/Obligations

The rights and obligations assertion ensures that the company has both the legal right to use the leased asset and the obligation to make lease payments. This is verified by reviewing lease agreements to confirm that the company has the rights to use the asset and that fulfills the terms of the lease, including making timely payments.

Auditors also check for any clauses in the lease contracts that could impact these rights or obligations, such as options to purchase or renew, which may affect the accounting treatment.

Presentation & Disclosure

Presentation and disclosure ensure that lease information is presented clearly and in accordance with the relevant accounting standards. This includes properly categorizing leases as operating or finance leases and making all required disclosures regarding the terms, amounts, and risks associated with the leases.

Auditors verify that lease-related transactions are presented accurately in the balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement, and that detailed footnotes provide transparency regarding lease commitments, future payments, and any contingent liabilities.

These assertions are used by auditors to assess the accuracy and completeness of a company’s lease accounting. By testing these assertions, auditors can help to ensure that the company’s financial statements are accurate and that they comply with applicable accounting standards.

Role of Internal Controls in Lease Audits

When conducting a lease accounting audit, internal controls play a crucial role in providing accurate and reliable financial reporting. Effective internal controls help to mitigate risks, detect errors, and ensure compliance with accounting standards such as ASC 842 or IFRS 16. Companies should establish thorough procedures for tracking lease data, including the identification, valuation, and reporting of lease-related transactions.

Aside from that, controls should be in place to ensure the completeness of lease portfolios, the correct classification of leases, and the regular monitoring of lease modifications. A good internal control system also ensures that lease transactions are recorded in the appropriate accounting period and are accurately reported. By building strong internal audit controls, businesses can prepare for external audits and ensure compliance with lease accounting regulations.

How to Better Prepare for the Audit Process for Lease Accounts

Anticipate Audit Needs

Lease audits focus on providing an independent evaluation of asset control and risk. This evaluation is designed to drive continuous improvement to an organization’s processes and system.

The Journal of Accountancy outlines a number of challenges for auditors when approaching the leases section of the audit. Gaining a broader understanding of these challenges is an excellent first step in preparing for lease audit procedures under ASC 842.

When preparing for an audit, the goal for accounting and finance professionals is to ensure their books are in order for when the auditors come around. A significant component of this preparation is completeness assertion, which translates to ensuring all transactions that were supposed to be recorded have been recognized in the financial statements.

Nearly all (99%) senior finance and accounting professionals have concerns about misreporting company lease information.

Avoid Costly Mistakes

The absence of lease audit procedures can present a challenge when leased asset information is not readily available or in a central database.

To comply with the new lease accounting standards, all lease arrangements and amendments need to be identified, reviewed and abstracted. Financial statements are impacted with lease-related assets, receivables, liabilities and deferred inflows of resources coming on to the statement of net position.

Essentially, preparing for an audit means looking at an organization’s leased asset portfolio and ensuring all relevant stakeholders are assessed and addressed.

New lease accounting standards, like ASC 842, are likely to get more attention than usual from the auditors. Delays or missteps can put your business’ audit at risk of costly mistakes, such as increased audit fees, fines or damage to company and personal reputation. But having everything ready for the auditors puts the liability on them to get their job done accurately and efficiently.

Ensure Accurate Compliance

As mentioned earlier, the key to successfully completing lease audits is being prepared and organized.

The end goal of lease audit procedures is to ultimately eliminate the need to worry by ensuring procedures are identifiable and support compliance under lease accounting standards.

By having a centralized database and lease accounting system in place, finance and accounting professionals will not only be able to get the information they need quickly and easily, they will also subconsciously adopt time-tested lease audit procedures as a science. Check out our lease accounting audit checklist to make sure your company is prepared for their next audit.