Somewhere in your close process, a right-of-use asset is being amortized inside a spreadsheet that one person built and no one else fully understands. That spreadsheet has grown to 40 tabs, and every reporting period the team holds its breath while the numbers roll forward. When ASC 842 pulled operating leases onto the balance sheet, it turned lease accounting from a footnote exercise into a recurring liability calculation with audit exposure attached. Most teams met the deadline with the tool they already had open. The problem is what happens after the deadline.

Spreadsheets don’t fail loudly. They fail quietly, one broken present-value formula cascading through every downstream schedule until an auditor finds it months later.

The real cost isn’t the software you’re avoiding

Manual lease accounting has a hidden payroll line. Your senior accountants spend days each quarter re-keying payment terms, rebuilding amortization schedules after a modification and reconciling entries that a system should generate on its own. That’s expensive labor aimed at data entry.

And the exposure compounds. A rent escalation entered in the wrong period, an incremental borrowing rate applied inconsistently across the portfolio, a lease renewal nobody flagged until it auto-extended. Each one is small until it lands in a disclosure. Auditors now expect a cell-by-cell trail showing who changed what and when, and a shared workbook can’t produce it.

What purpose-built software actually does differently

The difference isn’t a nicer interface. It’s that the calculations, the audit trail and the reporting live in one governed place instead of scattered across files.

Yardi Corom is lease accounting and lease management software built for corporate occupiers, and it earns its place by removing specific manual steps. Enter a lease once and Corom generates the ROU asset, the lease liability and the full amortization schedule under ASC 842 and IFRS 16 without a hand-coded formula in sight. When a lease is modified midterm, it remeasures the liability and posts the adjusting journal entries rather than leaving your team to rebuild the schedule from scratch. Critical dates, renewals, rent reviews and expirations surface as alerts, so an option deadline stops depending on someone remembering to check a tab. Every change carries a timestamp and a user, which is the audit trail spreadsheets structurally cannot keep. For a finance team running dozens or hundreds of leases across currencies, that’s the difference between a close that takes a week and one that takes an afternoon.

Getting the accounting team on board

The switch is often stalled by the people it helps most, because a familiar spreadsheet feels safer than a migration. Fair concern. The counterweight is that purpose-built lease accounting software makes the accountant’s work defensible: numbers you can trace, entries you can explain, deadlines you won’t miss.

The bottom line

Lease accounting stopped being a once-a-year task the moment leases hit the balance sheet, and the tool that got you through adoption is the same tool quietly adding risk to every close. Purpose-built software replaces manual schedule-building with governed calculations, and it hands your auditors the trail they now require. See how Yardi Corom handles your lease portfolio by requesting a demo with our team.

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.