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Streamline Year-End Close with Centri’s Lease Accounting Services: Maintenance and Administration

Year End Update

During your or your client’s year-end close and financial reporting process, Centri’s Lease Accounting Services can take the burden off your accounting staff and allow your team to focus on other critical aspects of the year-end close process.

At year-end and each reporting period, it is imperative to evaluate positions taken, such as whether a renewal option is certain to be exercised or the expected lease term for those short-term and identified evergreen leases. Further, ensuring the completion of lease population and identification of embedded leases is an ongoing effort to ensure accurate financial statement balances and disclosures. It is critical to set up the right control environment and related processes for identifying, abstracting, classifying, and properly accounting for your leases so every audit goes smoothly.

Current lease accounting standards can have far-reaching impacts on your financials. Complying with the standards can be a considerable burden, including interpreting and applying technical accounting guidelines, technology considerations, tax and financing implications, control and process implementation, and lease data management and abstraction. At Centri, we understand that lease accounting compliance is not a one-size-fits-all process.

Whether you have already adopted the standard or are undergoing a first-time audit to comply with US GAAP financial reporting requirements, Centri offers a comprehensive suite of services and capabilities to support your adoption, implementation, maintenance, and financial reporting needs.

Lease Implementation Services

• Assist with an effective implementation plan and execution, including practical expedients, to meet current and future compliance and administration requirements.
• Evaluate the current state of leases and existing personnel and technology capabilities.
• Assist in developing policies and procedures for lease administration.
• Support the initial implementation process, including evaluating, reporting, and disclosing leases before turning over ongoing lease administration.

Full Outsourced Administration

• Eliminate the burden by fully outsourcing your lease administration, including implementation, recurring reporting, and ongoing evaluations of new leases.
• Support your unique compliance and administrative needs.
• Provide journal entries, reporting, disclosures, and other tracking surroundings leases based on your compliance and informational needs.
• Provide ongoing support to evaluate new or amended lease agreements as needed.

Lease Software Implementation

Our experienced professionals help to streamline, simplify, and automate compliance by implementing a comprehensive lease software package solution.

• Evaluate the current state of leases and company compliance and reporting requirements.
• Assistance with tool and vendor identification, evaluation, and selection.
• Develop a detailed implementation project plan, including timeline and milestones.
• Manage software configuration and implementation process.

Complex Transactions

We can assist in evaluating complex leasing transactions, providing guidance, both informally and formally, for compliance needs throughout the leasing process.

• Lessor accounting.
• Subleasing arrangements.
• Embedded leases.
• Sales-leaseback transactions.

How Centri Can Help

Partnering with Centri to be the outsourced provider of your lease accounting allows you and your finance team to focus on more critical operational and accounting-related processes within your organization.

Centri is comprised of seasoned professionals with extensive GAAP and SEC reporting experience, including former international and Big 4 accounting firm partners, directors, senior managers, and managers. Our technical accounting professionals can assist companies with their ASC 842 assessment and implementation in the following areas:

• Understanding and complying with the concepts in the lease standard.
• Analyzing processes and developing new procedures to capture data for the lease accounting standard.
• Identifying a company’s full population of leases, including any embedded leases that may exist within service contracts.
• Selecting and implementing the company’s chosen IT solution, where Centri can perform all required functions to provide the appropriate maintenance and financial reporting, inclusive of lease administration, tracking key lease options and renewal dates, and providing information to management to ensure timely lease updates.
• Onboarding leases onto Centri’s lease solution, where we can perform all the required functions to provide appropriate maintenance and financial reporting.
• Identifying how the lease standard impacts the recording and disclosure of leases in your financial statements.
• Training staff who may have to change their processes.

Please contact us to learn how we can support your organization’s lease accounting needs.

This article was originally published on September 28, 2024. It was updated on February 18, 2025. 

Blake Roberts

Partner | Technical Accounting Practice Leader | CPA

Blake is a Partner at Centri Business Consulting and the leader of the firm’s Technical Accounting Practice. He has more than 18 years of public accounting experience. View Blake Roberts's Full Bio

Michael Kirchner

Managing Director | CPA, MBA

Mike is a Managing Director at Centri Business Consulting. He has more than 19 years of accounting, advisory, and audit experience. View Michael Kirchner's Full Bio