Strong, battle-tested processes are crucial for accurate, successful day-to-day lease accounting, as well as lease accounting compliance with new standards. Ensuring your lease accounting software includes a consistent workflow automation is an investment in success. When assessing new lease accounting software, don’t underestimate the importance of automated workflow for lease accounting.

The benefits of automated workflow for lease accounting includes, but aren’t limited to:

• Increased efficiency
• Reduction in errors
• Prevention of things getting lost or off track
• Empowerment of employees to be successful
• Reduction of the need for hands-on micromanagement
• Increased visibility to critical information
• Increased internal communication

When shopping for a lease accounting solution that offers automated workflow and lease accounting compliance capabilities, look for a software that offers the following characteristics:

• A quick and easy way users can see how many leases fall are pending review, pending approval and approved at a glance, such as color-coding leases in red (needs review), yellow (pending approval) and green (approved) bars to show workflow status of leases by each classification type
• The ability to customize the number of approvals and roles based on your organization’s individual needs
• The ability to run status reports on demand, or subscribe to routine email updates
• A system that automatically date and time stamps changes and preserves previous data, ensuring true workflow data collection
• A system that offers automated safeguards, such as status automatically flipping back to “needs review” status if the term or expense structure of a lease is changed after approval 
• A workflow status solution that is integrated into numerous system reports, automated alerts and the accounting dashboard

The end results justify the effort involved in selecting and adhering to an automated workflow process, such as CoStar’s software solution which manages individual lease schedules throughout an approval process.