What some of our customers are doing differently with their lease portfolios

You already work with us somewhere in your finance operation, whether that’s close and consolidation, reporting, tax, planning, or data connectivity. What you may not have seen is how other finance teams are applying that same approach to their lease portfolios, moving leases out of spreadsheets and disconnected processes and into the systems and workflows they already rely on.

That shift matters because leases are more than an accounting obligation. Real estate, equipment, fleet, and IT commitments can represent some of the largest financial obligations on the balance sheet, yet the information needed to manage them is often scattered across contracts, ERP records, shared drives, and spreadsheets. The finance teams doing something different are bringing that information together, giving them a clearer view of what they own, what’s coming due, where money is being left on the table, and where they have an opportunity to make a better decision.

Why leases stay manual longer than anything else

Leases are the rare financial obligation that no single team owns end to end. Procurement signs the contract. Real estate or operations manages the asset. Finance accounts for it, usually after every meaningful decision has already been made.

That split shows up in the data. Contracts live in SharePoint folders and shared drives. Payment terms live in the ERP. Critical dates live in someone's calendar, and the master picture lives in one spreadsheet maintained by one person who knows where all the exceptions are. When that person moves on, the knowledge goes with them.

The result is a process that works right up until the moment you need it to tell you something you didn't already know.

The money sits between the contracts

Here's the part most finance teams underestimate. The cost of managing leases reactively isn't the effort, it's the decisions you never got to make.

Leases roll month-to-month because nobody caught the expiration date. Those evergreen payments carry premiums of 15% or more, sometimes running for over a year before anyone spots them. Equipment gets renewed at the incumbent's rate rather than tested against the market. Cummins ran 73 competitive sourcing events across 26 countries through LeaseAccelerator and landed an average saving of 8% per lease. Real estate administration, handled centrally with clause and variable charge visibility, typically takes 10% to 12% out of portfolio cost.

During a merger, reorganization, or divestiture, the numbers get sharper still. Teams using LeaseAccelerator cut around 80 hours of manual work per transaction, reduce lease costs by 8%, and eliminate 18% of costly auto-renewals, while scenario modeling answers the buy out, break, or transfer questions before the deal timeline forces an answer.

These aren't theoretical outcomes. They're the kinds of results finance teams are seeing in real portfolios. And the impact isn't limited to cost savings. It changes how teams manage the accounting and information behind those portfolios, too.

"We’ve used LeaseAccelerator as our lease repository and accounting platform since the adoption of the lease accounting standard. It has provided a centralized source of lease data, helped support compliance and reporting requirements, and enabled consistent processes across our global lease portfolio. It’s been a reliable tool for our team throughout our ASC 842 journey," says Tyler Miller, CPA, CIA, Treasury Accounting at The Dow Chemical Company.

For Dow, the value is straightforward: one centralized source of lease data supporting compliance, reporting, and consistent processes across a global portfolio. That's the difference between having lease information and being able to rely on it.

One record, all the way through

The mechanism behind those numbers is simple. Every lease is captured once, at asset level, and everything downstream flows from that single record.

Once a lease is in, calculations, adjusting entries in closed periods, ERP posting, approval workflows, stakeholder notifications, and operational reporting all happen inside LeaseAccelerator. No supplemental spreadsheet, no side workbook for the awkward remeasurements. That straight-through path is what separates a platform that produces your numbers from one that produces your numbers and then hands them back to you for reconciliation.

For SAP teams, journal entries flow out of LeaseAccelerator and into ECC or S/4HANA through an out-of-the-box, no-code connection, taking close cycles from days to hours with an audit trail attached.

Built by accountants, backed by accountants

Most lease platforms were built by engineers. LeaseAccelerator was built by accountants, and it shows in how embedded leases are handled, how remeasurements calculate, and how defensible the audit trail is when someone asks a hard question.

The people matter as much as the platform. Every customer is paired with CPAs and finance professionals who have lived through implementations and audits themselves, so when your auditor raises something unusual, you're talking to someone who speaks your language rather than opening a support ticket.

And that support continues after implementation. For finance teams, the day-to-day experience of using a lease platform matters just as much as what it can do on paper. When questions come up, enhancements are needed, or something unexpected lands in the portfolio, responsive support can make the difference between keeping the process moving and falling back on manual work.

"I am very happy with the services provided through the Lease Accelerator tool. The platform is easy to use, intuitive, and helps streamline lease management activities efficiently. One of the key strengths of the support team is their prompt issue resolution, ensuring minimal disruption to business operations. They consistently provide timely updates on tickets, enhancements, and ongoing requests, which helps maintain transparency and confidence in the process. The combination of a user-friendly interface, reliable support, and proactive communication has made our experience highly positive. Overall, Lease Accelerator has been a valuable tool in supporting our lease accounting and compliance requirements," says Vivek Vinchhi, Assistant Manager at Honeywell.

For Honeywell, the experience comes down to the things that matter once a system is actually part of the finance operation: ease of use, issue resolution, communication, and confidence that requests won't disappear into a queue.

Lease data in the same picture as the rest of your numbers

This is where your existing relationship with us pays off. Lease data doesn't have to sit in its own corner. Through Simba Data Connectivity and Simba Embedded Analytics, lease exposure lands in the same dashboards as your P&L, expense, and capital planning views.

That means the conversation moves on. Instead of reporting what your lease obligations were last quarter, you're showing the CFO which assets are worth renewing, which should be returned, and what that decision does to free cash flow over the next three years.

What it looks like once you're live

The software question usually gets answered in a demo. The one that matters more is what happens in month seven, when an enhancement request is sitting in a queue or a lease type turns up that nobody planned for. That's why customer experience is part of the story, not an afterthought. Teams who have been through it tend to talk less about features and more about whether tickets move, and whether anyone tells them what's happening. That's usually what decides whether a system gets used properly or quietly worked around.

What good looks like from here

Teams running their lease portfolios this way stop treating renewals as deadlines and start treating them as negotiations. Month-end lease accounting becomes a step, not an event. Procurement and finance look at the same asset record. And the person who used to own the spreadsheet gets to spend that time somewhere it compounds.

AI lease abstraction is arriving next, reading contracts, filling the required fields, linking every value back to the clause it came from, and flagging anything uncertain for a quick human check. Early access is open now.

If any of this sounds like a problem you recognize, talk to your account manager. They can walk your portfolio through a quick assessment, show you where the evergreen and end-of-term exposure sits, and get you into the early adopter program for AI abstraction. You can also join the LeaseAccelerator peer community in insightsoftware Central to see how other finance teams are running theirs.