A large share of restatements in the first years after ASC 842 took effect traced back to lease data problems, not accounting judgment. The standard didn’t just move liabilities onto the balance sheet. It handed auditors a new checklist, and most of the items on it have nothing to do with whether your numbers are technically correct. They’re about whether you can prove how you got there.

For corporate occupiers, that shift matters. You might have 40 leases or 4,000, spanning office space, warehouses, vehicles and copiers across a dozen jurisdictions. When an auditor arrives, they aren’t asking whether your right-of-use assets look reasonable. They’re asking what happens when they pick one lease at random and ask you to reconstruct it.

So, what are they actually looking at?

A defensible audit trail

An auditor wants to see who entered a lease, who changed a discount rate and when. If your remeasurement lives in a spreadsheet that three people have edited without version history, you’ve already lost the argument. Systems that log every change, timestamp it and tie it to a user turn that conversation into a five-minute review.

Proof that every lease is captured

This is the completeness question, and it’s the one that sinks most occupiers. Auditors don’t trust that every lease made it into the system. They test for it. That means embedded leases buried in service contracts, a forklift agreement someone in operations signed, a short-term renewal nobody flagged. A credible system connects lease intake to the actual source documents and surfaces critical dates automatically, so a renewal doesn’t quietly convert into an unrecorded liability.

Consistent, repeatable assumptions

Discount rates, lease terms and the treatment of renewal options need to follow a defensible logic across the portfolio. When two similar leases carry wildly different incremental borrowing rates for no documented reason, expect questions. Automated calculation engines help here because they apply the same rules every time, and they show their work.

Clean handling of change

Leases rarely sit still. Expansions, contractions, terminations and modifications each trigger a recalculation, and each one is a chance to introduce an error. This is where manual processes tend to break. A platform that recalculates the modification and generates the corresponding journal entries removes an entire category of risk from the review.

Where Yardi Corom fits

This is the ground Yardi Corom is built for. Its lease accounting software solution links each lease to its source documents, logs every modification with a full audit trail and automates the FASB ASC 842, IFRS 16 and GASB 87 calculations that auditors test most heavily. Journal entries flow directly into your general ledger, so there’s no re-keying and no reconciliation gap between the lease system and the books. When an auditor pulls a lease, the supporting history is already attached.

The real payoff

None of this eliminates the audit. It changes what the audit costs you in time, staff hours and anxiety. The occupiers who sail through aren’t the ones with the cleanest judgment calls. They’re the ones who can answer every question before it’s asked.

Yardi Corom is built for CRE tenants managing exactly this kind of complexity. It handles both lease types under ASC 842, IFRS 16 and GASB standards, centralizes lease and sublease data and integrates with your existing financial systems. If you’re ready to move beyond spreadsheets, visit our website or schedule a meeting with the Corom team.