Using a Lease Management & Lease Administration Software |OHI

If you’d ask any real-estate executive of a company, “how do you manage the lease portfolio of your organization?”, they are likely to offer you spreadsheets or other similar software as the answer.

However, the increasing complexity of the lease accounting landscape has made it difficult to determine whether a lease agreement is following regulations or not.

For this reason, numerous organizations are looking forward to automation options. The criticality of the task requires a proper tool for analysis and management. Automated lease abstraction reduces fastens the process of abstraction and reduces the chances of human errors as well.

Lease administration is an important and performance-related task for a business. It is necessary to manage the lease portfolio carefully to optimize costs and get a clear insight into related liabilities and assets. This also means that, currently, the need for quality analysis and detailed reports is a pressing issue and something which is a far-fetched dream with obsolete spreadsheet management of lease portfolio. 

This is why we have prepared a lease administration write-up to help you acknowledge the benefits of a lease software and the features that it should have. This article will eliminate all your existing confusion regarding a lease automated software and help you make rational decisions.

What Is Lease Administration?

A lot of people are unaware of what is lease management software. The process of lease administration includes paying the rent that is due for leased facilities and receiving the rent that is due for owned facilities. For almost every real-estate organization, lease administration is an essential part of the legal and accounting requirement of the real estate portfolio. Any person responsible for lease administration has to fulfill these roles – processing, accounting, lease review, lease abstracting, lease audits, renewal, maintenance, repairs, reporting, information management, operating expense review, occupancy cost analysis, information management and document storage.

The purpose of lease automated software is to ease the process of lease management for businesses and help in business operations.

Why You Need a Lease Management/Lease Administration Software?

A lease administration software is designed to help you track the lease data of the organization. So, every time you need to refer to a piece of information in your lease document, you don’t have to open a 50-page or 100-page document. If you have ever done this work manually, we bet you have wished for an automated lease abstraction that would do the job on your behalf.

Of course, you can manage it manually through spreadsheets, but only till you are managing a fewer number of leased properties. As the number of properties under administration increase to more than 100, it becomes difficult to manage. This is where a lease abstraction software comes handy.

Processing of data takes time and managing this data also takes time. Manually or through spreadsheets, you may require a lot of time to pull out information of even ten lease documents. What if you have to import this data to a client-preferred database? It would eat up multiple days of the professional involved.

Wouldn’t it be easier to utilize a lease administration software for automation? Lease abstraction automation does it for you and much more quickly and efficiently than any human can. 

Benefits of using a Lease Management Software

Save Time and Money

In this digital era, where digital transformation is becoming the topmost priority, businesses are still using paper-based management for lease agreement management. In fact, the records of these lease agreements are not even stored in a central repository.

Can you imagine the amount of time needed to retrieve and use this data?

When businesses manually try to collate this disparate data, mistakes happen, and the risk of information increases.

With lease administration software, you can secure this data at a central location, which can improve time efficiency. It can also reduce the costs of execution and lease portfolio management. Lease abstraction automation serves various purposes and is one of the best investments you can make for your business.

Ensure Compliance

When an organization uses manual methods for lease administration, errors are common at the workplace. This is because the same team is responsible for looking after the compliance requirements and system discrepancies. The human eye can miss these errors.

A lease administration software is equipped with tools to find system discrepancies that pose a compliance risk. These automated procedures can process the most complicated lease portfolio without any issue. This includes creating obligatory statements such as cash flow, income, balance sheet, and other similar reports to analyze compliance.

Keep Audit Trail

One of the important features of a lease administration software is the ability to report and monitor changes in the lease portfolio. Every big or small modification in the portfolio is tracked and recorded to create an audit trail. This is extremely difficult to achieve when you are working on Excel sheets.

Firstly, with spreadsheets, your data can be duplicated easily, and that makes tracking impossible. Secondly, the lease portfolio organizations are not apt in the Excel-type of a management system. This is why a lease administration software is utilized to trace and organize lease portfolio data.

Get Secure Storage

As already discussed in previous pointers, an electronic filing tool such as Excel may be simpler and user-friendly, but there is a possibility of mismanagement, always. Even if you take care of saving the latest file versions, collaboration is still an issue. You can accidentally find the superseded file and mistakenly use that to update recent work.

It is not uncommon for different users to pick a file from the database, make changes, and create multiple versions without a trace of which one is the latest. This restricts the flexibility and data security of traditional lease administration methods to a great extent.

With a lease administration software, users can gain cloud access to one spreadsheet. This means that if four users wish to work on one lease portfolio, they can do it on the same sheet. So, every other user is informed of the changes. Finally, only one latest version of the file is saved and available.

Working this way secures the information and eliminates the risk of duplication or outdated data.

Tailored Reports

Lease administration software allows the tailoring of reports according to the requirements of the organization. While this feature may not be available with every tool, you still get advanced reports, which are beneficial for the business. Through these reports, you can get a collated look at lease portfolios and analyze your progress.  A lease analysis software helps get quick and accurate reports. These reports are instrumental in preparing business strategies.

What Should a Lease Administration Software Offer?

Here’s a list of features that you should receive along with your lease administration software –

• You should be able to inspect your individual real-estate units along with expenses related to your lease portfolio
• You need reporting abilities to judge your liabilities, costs, and discrepancies in data. These reports are also necessary for auditing purposes
• There should exist a seamless channel of communication. This means accounting systems should be in sync
• You should be able to map the owned and leased real-estate for simpler management
• Along with all the above features, it is necessary to have the ability to analyze your portfolio and measure its performance through KPIs

Conclusion

If you fail to manage your lease information, you are likely to put this information to waste. When your data has discrepancies and information is duplicated, you only end up spreading the wrong information to stakeholders. Using lease administration software can help you mitigate these issues. Check the above lease administration write-up to improve your lease portfolio management. It is high time you understand the importance of lease analysis software and get one for yourself. 

About

OHI is a fifteen-year-old real estate services company working with 50+ commercial and residential real estate developers, funds and property management companies across USA. Our deep expertise in real estate accounting, financial analysis, lease abstraction, administration and asset management has helped clients cut associated costs by 40-50%. We currently provide these services to a portfolio of 50000 units across clients.

We invite you to experience leasing and accounting outsourcing through us.