Two lease accounting platforms that get shortlisted together, and one of them now reads your lease documents while the other still expects you to key the terms in. Here is the honest split.
Upload a document to extract
Drop files here or click to upload
Up to 50 files, 50MB each
Uploading...
Compiled from each vendor's own public product and pricing pages in August 2026. LeaseCrunch rebranded to Crunchafi on June 25, 2025, so a proposal that still says LeaseCrunch is describing the Crunchafi product. The two rows that decide most shortlists are AI lease abstraction and GASB.
| Software | Core job | AI lease abstraction | Standards named by the vendor | Lessor accounting | Try it free yourself |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LeaseAbstractors This tool | Turn lease PDFs into structured data | Yes, source-linked fields | Standard agnostic, exports the data | Feeds either side | Yes, no signup or demo |
| Black Owl Systems | Lease accounting close, lessee and lessor | Not advertised on its product pages | ASC 842, IFRS 16, ASPE 3065. No GASB | Yes, sales-type and direct financing | No, demo and sales quote |
| Crunchafi (formerly LeaseCrunch) | Lease accounting built for CPA firms | Yes, added November 4, 2025 | ASC 842, IFRS 16, FRS 102, GASB 87, 94, 96 | Yes, lessee and lessor workflows | No, demo and sales quote |
| Trullion | AI lease accounting for accounting teams | Yes, core to the product | ASC 842, IFRS 16, GASB 87, FRS 102 | Lessee focused | No, demo and sales quote |
Sources: blackowlsystems.com product and pricing pages, crunchafi.com product pages and the November 4, 2025 AI Lease Abstraction announcement, August 2026. Neither Black Owl Systems nor Crunchafi publishes a price; both are demo and quote led with no public rate card and no free trial. Black Owl's plan feature lists name ASC 842, IFRS 16 and the Canadian ASPE 3065; GASB 87 appears only in its general explainer copy about the standards, so treat GASB as unsupported until the vendor confirms otherwise. Confirm current pricing and features with each vendor before you buy.
Both vendors describe themselves in almost identical language, both hide pricing behind a demo, and one of them changed its name in the middle of most buyers' research. These are the six things that trip up shortlists.
LeaseCrunch became Crunchafi on June 25, 2025. Vendor lists, RFP templates and internal notes still say LeaseCrunch, so buyers compare a product against its own new brand without realizing it.
Black Owl lists five plan tiers with no numbers on any of them. Crunchafi routes every visitor to a demo request. You cannot build a budget from either website, only from a sales call.
No free trial, no self-serve upload. You find out how each one handles your messiest lease, the one with three amendments and a cumulative CAM cap, after procurement rather than before.
US public sector and government reporters often assume any ASC 842 platform covers GASB 87. Crunchafi names GASB 87, 94 and 96. Black Owl names GASB 87 only in general explainer copy about the standards, never as a supported standard on a plan.
Reading a 90 page lease and calculating a right of use asset are two different jobs. Both vendors sell the second one. Only one of them now does any part of the first.
Whichever platform wins, someone still has to get rent steps, option notice windows and CAM terms out of the documents. Implementations stall on that step, not on the software.
Six questions, answered honestly, usually settle this shortlist in about ten minutes. Work down the list and stop at the first one that rules a vendor out.
This is the fastest disqualifier. Crunchafi names ASC 842, IFRS 16, FRS 102 and GASB 87, 94 and 96 in one workflow. Black Owl's plan feature lists name ASC 842, IFRS 16 and ASPE 3065; GASB 87 appears on its site only in explainer copy about the standards, not on any plan. If you are a city, county, school district, utility or any government reporter, Black Owl comes off the list on this row alone.
Crunchafi announced AI Lease Abstraction on November 4, 2025, a Create from File workflow that pulls lease term, start and end dates and asset information out of an uploaded contract. Black Owl loads data through the front end, a mass upload template or its API, and does not advertise document extraction. Plan on keying terms into Black Owl or abstracting them separately first.
Both sell to firms, but from different directions. Crunchafi built its business on CPA firms and says more than 750 use it, with a multi client model at its center. Black Owl publishes CPA Essentials and CPA Advanced plans alongside its Small Business, Large Companies and Enterprise tiers, so the firm workflow is a plan rather than the whole product.
Black Owl includes unlimited users and entities on every tier and adds multi currency, custom journal entry mapping, ERP integrations, single sign on and test environments as you move up. If you consolidate several legal entities in more than one currency, that is where its tiering is aimed. Crunchafi does not lead with multi currency on its product pages.
Black Owl's own FAQ puts implementation at four to eight weeks. Crunchafi says most organizations can start inputting leases and generating reports within minutes. Both claims come from the vendors, so treat them as targets rather than guarantees, but the gap tells you how each product expects to be bought.
Black Owl handles lessor accounting including sales type and direct financing classifications, which most lease tools skip, and it is the capability it is best known for. Crunchafi documents lessor entry as well as lessee. If you book landlord side entries, ask both to demo a sales type lease with your own numbers.
Both platforms need your lease terms before they can calculate anything, and only one of them reads part of the document for you. Getting clean, verified data out of the leases first is what keeps an implementation from stalling, and you can do it today without a contract.
Drop in the original lease, all amendments, and the exhibits. Scans are fine. No signup, no demo to book.
You get parties, premises and square footage, commencement and expiration, base rent and every escalation, renewal and termination options with their notice windows, and the CAM recovery terms as structured fields.
Every field links back to the page and clause it came from, so a reviewer confirms an escalation or an option deadline in seconds instead of re-reading eighty pages.
Export to Excel, CSV or JSON, or use the API, so the abstracts flow into Black Owl, Crunchafi or any other system of record without anyone re-keying them.
Last updated August 2026. What each product actually is, where each one wins, and the question that settles most shortlists.
Black Owl Systems and Crunchafi, the platform that was called LeaseCrunch until June 25, 2025, are both lease accounting engines rather than lease abstraction tools. Crunchafi covers more standards, including GASB 87, 94 and 96, and since November 4, 2025 it reads part of an uploaded lease for you. Black Owl covers ASC 842, IFRS 16 and the Canadian ASPE 3065, lists GASB on no plan, does not advertise document extraction, and is the stronger of the two on lessor accounting and multi entity, multi currency close. Neither publishes pricing and neither lets you test it on your own leases first.
Black Owl is a calculation engine. You give it lease terms and it produces journal entries, amortization schedules, rollforwards and disclosure reports, handling modifications, reassessments, renewals, terminations, variable payments and custom payment schedules along the way. The capability that sets it apart is lessor accounting: sales type, direct financing, operating and finance classifications from the landlord side, which most lease accounting tools simply do not support. Its pricing page lists five tiers, Small Business, Large Companies and Enterprise for companies plus CPA Essentials and CPA Advanced for firms, with unlimited users and entities on the baseline and multi currency, ERP integrations, a custom journal entry mapper, single sign on and test environments arriving as you move up. The company publishes SOC 1 Type 2 and SOC 2 Type 2 attestations of its own. The honest caveats: no numbers on any tier, no GASB on any plan, an implementation window its own FAQ puts at four to eight weeks, a thin independent review base, and no AI reading of your documents. Data gets in through the interface, a mass upload template or the API. Our Black Owl Systems vs Trullion comparison covers the other product it is weighed against most often.
Crunchafi grew up inside the CPA firm world and it still shows. The company says more than 750 firms use it, and the product is organized around a firm managing many client entities rather than one company managing its own books. It names ASC 842, IFRS 16, FRS 102 and GASB 87, 94 and 96 in the same workflow, which is the widest standard coverage of the two by a clear margin and the reason government and public sector reporters keep landing on it. It documents both lessee and lessor entry. The name change is worth pinning down because it confuses research: LeaseCrunch became Crunchafi on June 25, 2025, the products carried over, and Strongbox, which arrived through the Finagraph merger in November 2024, now sells as Crunchafi Data Extraction. That data extraction product pulls financial data out of a client's accounting system or ERP into a standardized Excel workbook. It is not lease abstraction, and mixing the two up is the single most common mistake we see on this comparison. The actual abstraction feature is separate and newer: the rebrand explainer has the full timeline, and what LeaseCrunch costs covers what buyers report paying.
On November 4, 2025 Crunchafi announced AI Lease Abstraction, a Create from File option in its Add Leases workflow. Per the announcement it identifies the lease term, start and end dates and asset information from an uploaded contract, and its Chief Product Officer described the effect as turning several minutes of data entry into seconds. The announcement did not state which file types are supported, whether human review is required, or whether the feature is included in the Lease Accounting plan, so ask all three in the demo. What it plainly does not claim to do is produce a full lease abstract. Base rent steps and every escalation, percentage rent, the renewal and termination options with their exact notice windows, holdover rates, CAM and operating expense recovery terms with caps and exclusions, assignment and sublease consent standards, signage and parking rights, co tenancy triggers, restoration obligations: that is the field set a lease administrator or asset manager needs, and it runs to eighty or more data points per lease. Black Owl claims none of this, which at least sets expectations honestly. Our guide to what a lease abstract looks like shows the full field set side by side.
Choose Black Owl Systems if you book lessor entries, if you consolidate multiple legal entities in more than one currency, if you report under ASC 842, IFRS 16 or Canadian ASPE 3065, and if your lease data already exists in a clean spreadsheet. Its lessor depth and its unlimited entity model are real differentiators, not marketing. Choose Crunchafi if you are a CPA firm serving many clients, if any of those clients report under GASB, if you want the widest standard coverage in one workflow, or if you want at least the first pass of data entry done from the document rather than by hand. Rule Black Owl out immediately on GASB. Rule Crunchafi out if lessor sales type accounting is your core requirement and its lessor workflow does not hold up in the demo. And do not choose either one yet if what you actually have is a shared drive full of lease PDFs, because both platforms assume the data exists.
We do one job and we are not a lease accounting engine: we turn lease documents into structured, verified data. Upload a PDF or a scan and the AI reads the whole thing, amendments and exhibits included, then returns a review ready abstract in minutes with every value linked back to its source page. You can test that on your own lease right now, free, with no demo and no contract, which is exactly the step both Black Owl and Crunchafi make you skip. Exports run to Excel, CSV and JSON, and there is an API, so the abstracts load into Black Owl, Crunchafi, NetSuite, Yardi or MRI without anyone re-keying them. The honest trade off: we do not book your journal entries and we do not produce your disclosures. If you have financial statements to sign, you still want one of these platforms underneath. What we replace is the slow, expensive step of getting the terms out of the documents. See the lease abstraction software overview or the best lease abstraction software roundup for the wider field, and lease abstraction for CPA firms if you are evaluating this for an engagement.
Bring one real lease, ideally your worst one, and ask each vendor to run it end to end. Ask Black Owl exactly how the mass upload template maps to their fields and what happens when a lease has three amendments that each change the rent step. Ask Crunchafi which file types the Create from File workflow accepts, what the AI does when a scanned exhibit contains the option notice window, and whether abstraction is included in the Lease Accounting plan or priced separately. Ask both for a written price that covers year two and three, since implementation is a one time cost and the subscription is not. Ask both what happens to your data if you leave. Those five questions surface more than any feature matrix.
Still have questions? Our team is happy to help.
Talk to our teamBlack Owl Systems is a lease accounting engine covering ASC 842, IFRS 16 and the Canadian ASPE 3065, with unusually deep lessor accounting and no advertised document extraction. LeaseCrunch, now Crunchafi, is built around CPA firms, covers ASC 842, IFRS 16, FRS 102 and GASB 87, 94 and 96, and added AI lease abstraction in November 2025. The standards coverage and the document reading are the two real differences.
Yes. LeaseCrunch rebranded to Crunchafi on June 25, 2025. It is the same company and the same lease accounting product under a new name, and the announcement said the transition would be seamless for existing clients. If a vendor list, proposal or engagement letter still says LeaseCrunch, it is describing what is now Crunchafi.
No. Black Owl's product pages do not advertise AI lease abstraction or document extraction. It is a lease accounting engine that calculates from terms you supply, and data goes in through the interface, a mass upload template or the API. Expect to key lease terms in, or abstract the documents with a separate tool first and import the results.
Yes, since November 4, 2025. Crunchafi added a Create from File option to its Add Leases workflow that identifies the lease term, start and end dates and asset information from an uploaded contract. It is a data entry accelerator rather than a full lease abstract, so it does not claim to capture CAM terms, option notice windows or co tenancy clauses.
Black Owl's pricing and product pages list ASC 842, IFRS 16 and the Canadian ASPE 3065 standard on its plans, and GASB 87 turns up only in its general explainer copy about the standards, not as a supported plan feature. US government and public sector reporters that need GASB 87, 94 or 96 should treat it as unsupported and confirm with the vendor. Crunchafi names all three GASB standards explicitly.
Neither publishes a price. Black Owl lists five plan tiers with no numbers and a Contact Sales button on each, and Crunchafi routes every visitor to a demo request. Both are quote led with no free trial, so a number only arrives after a sales conversation. Ask for years two and three in writing, not just the first year plus implementation.
Crunchafi is the safer default for a firm, because the multi client model is what the company was built around and it says more than 750 firms use it, and because client GASB engagements are covered. Black Owl publishes CPA Essentials and CPA Advanced plans and is the better answer when a firm's clients need lessor accounting or multi currency consolidation.
No. Neither vendor offers a self serve free trial, so you cannot see how either handles your messiest lease until after procurement. A practical workaround is to abstract two or three of your hardest leases with a self serve tool, verify the fields against the source pages, and walk into both demos already knowing what accurate output looks like.
All eleven rivals in one table, with what each publishes about price.
Learn moreThe CPA firm option, now branded Crunchafi.
Learn moreThe same engine against the enterprise lifecycle platform.
Learn moreAn accounting engine against an AI-first platform.
Learn moreAn accounting engine against a tenant-side platform.
Learn moreAn honest side-by-side comparison of the top tools.
Learn more