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Equipment Lease Management Software: Account for Every Asset

Equipment lease management software, sometimes referred to as asset leasing software, is a digital solution organizations use to identify, organize, track, and administer leased assets. Whether it’s a dedicated tool or part of a broader lease administration and accounting solution, these tools ensure organizations never miss critical dates or status changes, stay in compliance with regulations and contracts, and help maintenance teams make better decisions.

Tango Lease is a comprehensive lease management software used by many of the world’s leading enterprises. With robust time-saving tools, Tango helps you manage leased assets more efficiently at any scale.

This article will explore some of the key capabilities of equipment lease management software and highlight what makes Tango the ideal solution for your business.

Identify every leased asset

Under ASC 842, businesses and nonprofits alike now need to identify embedded leases—clauses and contracts that aren’t specifically described as leases, but which give your organization the right to exclusively use or benefit from an asset for an established duration in exchange for some form of compensation. This compensation doesn’t always look like a direct payment for the right to the asset, but may be tied to resources you need in order to use or benefit from it.

For example, you may have a contract that gives you the right to use an ice cream machine, but your contract requires you to buy all your ice cream from the supplier of the machine. That’s an equipment lease, and depending on the circumstances of that lease, it may need to go on your books as a liability.

The more contracts and legal agreements you have with suppliers, contractors, and lessors, the more overwhelming it becomes to think about identifying these embedded asset leases. But each one represents a potential liability, and ASC 842 aims to make all organizations’ finances more transparent for potential investors and government agencies.

Advanced equipment lease management software automates this time-intensive process and removes the potential for human error.

While ASC 842 has made lease identification far more complex for organizations, with advanced equipment lease management software like Tango Lease, it becomes easier than ever.

Create and track every lease schedule

Monitoring critical dates is one of the more challenging aspects of equipment lease management. The larger your operation, the easier it is to miss lease renewal windows, how lease modifications may change your timeline, and the steps you need to take to stay in compliance. With equipment leases, you may have to schedule work to comply with regulations surrounding the equipment or requirements from the supplier.

Even if your facility maintenance department is familiar with an asset’s legal requirements, they may be completely unaware of additional stipulations required by the lease. As your facility manager navigates preventive maintenance schedules and chooses what work to defer, you may need to ensure they’re aware of maintenance-related clauses in the contract.

When a lease is abstracted key dates a captured in the system and Tango Lease provides a variety of alert and reporting options. Your lease department can easily see all upcoming dates and any steps you need to take. And since Tango Lease integrates with your facility maintenance software, your facility manager can see anything that affects them and coordinate work orders as needed.

Automate lease accounting calculations

For finance leases—leases where you bear most of the risk and benefit from the asset—ASC 842, IFRS 16, and GASB 87 require businesses to perform detailed calculations regarding the liability the asset presents to your organization, such as the lease liability and right of use amortization.

To ensure your business is in compliance with FASB, IASB, or GASB standards, you have to hire external accountants (for hundreds of dollars an hour) to verify your calculations. The harder it is for them to check your work, the longer it takes, and the more it costs you.

Equipment lease management software means their job can be done more quickly and less expensively.

After identifying your embedded leases and helping you classify them correctly, Tango Lease can perform lease accounting calculations automatically and post the required information in the General Ledger, so auditors can quickly find everything they need, and there’s less risk of human errors causing discrepancies or delays.

Stay in compliance

In equipment lease management, compliance can feel like a minefield. You have to keep assets in compliance with the lease or contract itself, the regulating bodies that oversee your organization, and any regulations relating to the asset. That’s not information you want to have locked away in a file cabinet or buried in subfolders your facility manager can’t access. And you don’t want to run the risk of misrepresenting your organization’s financial liabilities by failing to identify equipment leases or report them correctly.

Whether you need to comply with ASC 842, IFRS 16, or GASB 87, equipment lease management software helps you stay in compliance by:

  • Improving visibility on every asset
  • Organizing critical lease information
  • Monitoring lease schedules
  • Automating lease accounting calculations
  • Presenting the right information in the right ways and in the right places

Some equipment lease management solutions only help with some of these processes, such as organizing lease information or improving visibility. Tango Lease, however, is a comprehensive lease solution to help you administer and account for your entire lease portfolio.

Share visibility across your organization

In many enterprises and businesses with multiple locations, there’s often a critical gap between the leasing department and other teams and processes that could (and should) incorporate equipment lease information into important decisions, such as facility maintenance, space management, and site selection.

That way your maintenance teams can make more informed repair or replace decisions and follow supplier guidelines, your administrators and management teams can take necessary precautions to plan around leased assets, and your site selection process can better recognize the impact of embedded leases from one location to another.

For example, your contract may require a piece of equipment to remain in a particular part of the facility or stay within a certain distance of other machinery, which could overrule plans to reconfigure a room. Or maybe employees need specific training or certifications before they’re authorized to use the equipment under the lease.

Tango Lease lets you decide who should have access to lease information and how much access they need. Whether an employee needs access to specific documents or high-level information, you’re in control.

Manage leased assets at scale

When you have dozens, hundreds, or thousands of locations, your lease portfolio could easily contain several times more equipment leases, many of which are embedded in facility leases and other contracts that don’t designate them as “leases,” while still having the same legal effect and financial impact.

The larger your operation, the more unwieldy equipment lease management becomes. Many enterprises find it challenging to even identify all of their assets, let alone specify which assets are leased, owned, or rented. And when you haven’t been required to put your leased assets on the books for years, adopting new compliance standards can feel like a monumental task. But it doesn’t have to be.

Tango Lease makes it easy to navigate your portfolio to find all of your documentation for specific leases and assets, keeping everything connected, organized, and accessible. Our AI combs through every contract for key clauses, dates, and information so that your lease department has more time to find you savings opportunities. As your lease portfolio grows, Tango keeps it manageable.

Strengthen future lease negotiations

In lease negotiations, being able to easily navigate and understand your portfolio gives you powerful leverage. Whether you’re negotiating with a landlord or supplier you’re already under contract with or you’re finding yourself in a familiar position in unfamiliar territory, quality equipment lease management software should organize your current and past leases so that you can easily filter and compare assets, contracts, clauses, and terms—and then bring the highlights to your negotiations.

Maybe the lessor you’re currently working with gave you more favorable terms in the past, and now they’re requiring you to take on more responsibility and risk without giving you more benefit from the asset. Or perhaps one of their competitors included a clause you really liked that resulted in significant savings.

Tango Lease gives you visibility into trends, patterns, similarities, and discrepancies across your lease portfolio, so you can leverage information to get the most favorable terms possible.

Reduce operating costs

Your lease department does a lot of critical work that saves your organization money and keeps you in compliance with regulating bodies. Unfortunately there’s also a lot of tedious, time-consuming administrative work that prevents them from focusing on finding savings opportunities and pursuing more complex tasks that require their expertise.

With a comprehensive lease administration and accounting solution like Tango Lease, your organization can dramatically reduce the time spent on lease-related tasks like managing compliance requirements, handling expense reconciliation, maintaining lease schedules, and performing lease accounting calculations.

Streamline lease management tasks

To be effective, equipment lease management software shouldn’t just provide access to information—it should empower individual users with clear objectives and tasks each time they open the application. Whether an administrator or an accountant uses the software, the tools and functionality they need should be at their fingertips. Tango Lease ensures each user gets what they need in a convenient dashboard. They can easily prioritize, organize, approve, or assign tasks as needed.

Optimize your process with equipment lease management software from Tango

Tango Lease is a complete lease accounting solution that can easily support your equipment lease management needs. Tango Lease automatically finds and organizes the information your administrators need and conducts lease accounting calculations. Identifying embedded equipment leases is effortless, and compliance with ASC 842, IFRS 16, and GASB 87 is a breeze.

With Tango Lease, your lease department can save hours on tedious processes and reclaim that time for the problems and opportunities that truly require their expertise.

Want to see Tango Lease for yourself?

Schedule a demo.