Real estate and accounting teams need shared access to leasing data and the ability to create a variety of lease management reports to do their jobs. Many companies need the ability to cross-functionally report on financial information within the organization. These financial reports may cover topics such as future obligation forecasting, asset and liability roll-forward balances, monthly reviews of standing asset and liability amounts, and even quarterly and annual disclosures.

While it’s important to capture this financial reporting information across an entire portfolio, often users need to narrow down this data to focus on a particular area of the business. This may take the shape of separate business units, company codes, cost centers, operating entities, legal entities, countries, continents, or other geographical regions, all depending upon the way a business is organized. For lease accounting, users need to be able to quickly and effortlessly “slice and dice” reports to pull this information across a company’s organizational structure, however it may be organized, to provide timely and accurate information to technical accounting teams, upper management, and internal and external auditors. Lease accounting software should provide security features so that only authorized persons will be able to view, change or report on data under their jurisdiction. Those users should have the ability to run a variety of reports that show only the selected data a user wants. Standard reports—such as accounting forecast, disclosure and roll forward reports—and ad hoc reports should be available for any combination of portfolios and easily roll up to consolidated reporting. Ad hoc reports should allow authorized users to use filters to determine which data they would like included so they are not inundated with extraneous information. When leasing software lacks the ability to filter data for reports, accountants are forced to run a report that includes data for the entire company. Then they have to export that report into a spreadsheet, use Excel’s Vlookup function to add in labels that identify the data according to the company’s hierarchy, and then use filters, subtotals, or pivot tables to reorganize the data to display only their portfolio of leases.