Your client cannot find half their leases, and the ones they do send are scanned PDFs. Upload them and get term, payments, options, and the facts behind the discount rate back as structured fields in minutes, each citing its source page.
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Every accounting firm doing lease work has picked one of these five routes, usually without ever comparing them side by side. The differences that matter to a practice are realization, turnaround inside busy season, and whether the work leaves an evidence trail a reviewer or a peer reviewer can follow. Here is an honest read on each, including where ours stops.
| How the lease data gets produced | Who does the work | Time per lease | What it costs you at review |
|---|---|---|---|
| The client builds a spreadsheet | A controller, between other jobs | Unpredictable | It arrives incomplete and unsourced. You spend the engagement reconciling a summary back to documents nobody attached, and amendments are the usual casualty |
| Firm staff abstract by hand | Associates and seniors on the engagement | 4 to 8 hours for a complex lease | Realization falls, the work lands in busy season, and on an attest client every hour has to clear the nonattest service rules before it starts |
| Outsourced abstraction vendor | A third party, often offshore | Days to weeks per batch | Priced per lease with a real turnaround. Quality moves with whoever reviewed it, and you review the output again anyway |
| Abstraction inside lease accounting software | The platform, where it offers it | Minutes to hours | Coverage differs sharply by vendor, and it only helps once the client has selected, bought, and implemented that platform. It does nothing during the assessment |
| LeaseAbstractors, then your review This tool | AI extracts, your team or the client reviews | Minutes per lease | The output is a reviewed spreadsheet, not a posted entry. Every accounting judgment stays with whoever is supposed to make it, which on an attest engagement is the whole point |
We are not lease accounting software and do not try to be. There is no amortization schedule, no journal entry, and no subledger here. This is the document reading step that has to happen before any of those tools have something to calculate from.
A right of use asset is only as defensible as the facts underneath it, and the facts that get questioned are always the same handful: how long the lease really runs, what gets paid and when, which options are reasonably certain, and what the client knew when they picked a discount rate. These are the fields the extraction returns.
The date control of the asset actually transferred, the stated term, and the expiration, pulled as dates rather than prose. Commencement is the single field most often taken from the wrong page, and it moves every number in the schedule.
Base rent by period, fixed and index linked escalations, free rent periods, and payment timing, read from the rent exhibit instead of the summary page, so the lease payments feeding the present value calculation match the document.
Renewal, termination, and purchase options with their notice windows and economics, so your client has something concrete to reason from when they conclude whether exercise is reasonably certain. The conclusion stays theirs.
Any rate stated or implied in the document, residual value guarantees, and the terms that bear on whether the rate implicit in the lease is even determinable. Whether you land on an incremental borrowing rate or a risk free election is an accounting judgment, not an extraction.
CAM, operating expense structure, base year or expense stop, pro rata share, caps, and percentage rent, separated out so the payments that belong in the liability are not quietly mixed with the ones that get expensed as incurred.
Each extracted value links back to the page and clause it came from. That is what turns a client spreadsheet into something a reviewer can test in seconds, and what an engagement quality reviewer asks for when a lease conclusion is challenged.
From a client folder of scanned PDFs to a reviewed schedule your team can work from, without an associate keying fields in February.
Base leases, amendments, assignments, side letters, exhibits, and the contracts nobody filed as leases. Scanned and image only PDFs are fine. Embedded leases hide inside service and equipment agreements, which is where completeness testing usually fails.
The model returns term and commencement, the payment schedule, options and notice windows, variable payments, and discount rate inputs as structured fields rather than a narrative summary you would have to re read.
Every field points to its page, so confirming a commencement date or a renewal notice window takes seconds instead of reopening a hundred page document. This is also the step that keeps judgment where it belongs.
Download as Excel or CSV and feed it into your firm template or the client lease accounting platform. The same file supports the schedule, the disclosure roll forward, and the workpaper trail behind both.
Last updated August 2026. What independence rules allow, what ASC 842 needs out of the document, how governmental clients differ, and where abstraction stops and lease accounting begins.
Yes, with conditions. Lease abstraction is a nonattest service, and the AICPA Code of Professional Conduct permits nonattest services for an attest client only if the general requirements in ET section 1.295.040 are met. The client must not hand you management responsibilities, must designate an individual with suitable skills, knowledge, or experience to oversee the service, must evaluate the adequacy and results of what you did, and must accept responsibility for it. The understanding should be documented in writing before the work starts. Firms get into trouble on the second condition rather than the first: designating someone in name only, who cannot actually evaluate a lease schedule, is not oversight. Source linked fields help here for an unglamorous reason. When every extracted value points at the page it came from, a client controller can genuinely review the population instead of initialing a spreadsheet they have no way to test.
Less than most abstraction templates capture, and more than most client spreadsheets contain. To measure a lease liability you need the lease term including options the client concludes are reasonably certain of exercise, the lease payments over that term with their escalations, and a discount rate. To get the right of use asset you add initial direct costs, prepaid rent, and lease incentives such as a tenant improvement allowance. Classification then turns on transfer of ownership, purchase options, term relative to economic life, present value relative to fair value, and specialized nature. Everything else in a full abstract, the use clause, the assignment restrictions, the signage rights, matters to the business but not to the measurement. Our commercial lease abstract template sets out the wider field list if you want the whole picture.
By hand, roughly four to eight hours for a complex commercial lease with a stack of amendments, and under an hour for a short equipment schedule. That range is the reason lease work distorts a practice: a firm carrying forty clients with a dozen leases each is looking at something close to a full time year of associate time before anyone calculates anything. It also explains why lease adoption work so often slips into busy season and quietly stops being profitable. We walk through the arithmetic in more detail in how long lease abstraction takes.
Completeness is the hardest part of a lease engagement and it is rarely a lease problem. The base leases are usually easy. What gets missed are amendments that changed a term years later, month to month arrangements nobody documented, and embedded leases sitting inside service, logistics, and equipment agreements that were never called leases by anyone. A practical sweep pairs the accounts payable ledger with the fixed asset and rent expense accounts, then asks for every contract above a threshold rather than every contract labeled lease. Clients whose documents are scattered across shared drives and mailboxes often cannot even scope the population until someone searches every system at once. We cover the mechanics in embedded leases under ASC 842.
Usually yes, and they solve different halves of the problem. Lease accounting platforms hold the schedules, run the amortization, produce the journal entries, and generate the disclosure roll forward. FinQuery, for example, states that its platform is built to help CPA firms scale their services across their client portfolios, and lists ASC 842, IFRS 16, FRS 102, GASB 87, GASB 96, and SFFAS 54 among the standards it supports. None of that removes the reading step. Something still has to turn a scanned lease into the term, payments, and options the engine calculates from, and on a new client that step happens before any platform has been chosen. Our ASC 842 lease accounting software comparison covers the platforms themselves, and lease accounting software for CPA firms looks specifically at the multi client question.
The document work is nearly identical and the reporting is not. Governmental lessees under GASB 87 recognize a lease liability and an intangible right to use asset, and governments are also lessors far more often than commercial clients, which brings the lessor side into scope on the same leases. Firms auditing cities, counties, school districts, transit authorities, and public universities usually carry both directions plus GASB 96 subscription arrangements. The fields you pull off the document barely change. What changes is which side of the transaction you are measuring and which note disclosures the abstract has to support. Our GASB 87 software page covers the reporting tools, and GASB 87 versus ASC 842 sets out where the two standards actually diverge.
The line is cleaner than it looks, and keeping it clean is what protects an attest engagement. Extraction is a reading task: what does the document say the term is, what does the rent exhibit say gets paid, what notice does the renewal option require. Judgment is everything downstream: whether an option is reasonably certain of exercise, whether the rate implicit in the lease is determinable, whether to elect the risk free rate, whether a contract contains a lease at all. A tool should do the first and refuse the second. That is also why the output here is a spreadsheet rather than a posting, and why every field carries a citation: it hands your team the facts and leaves the conclusions, and the documentation, on the right side of the line. If you are weighing an outside provider for the same work, the cost comparison is in our lease abstraction services and companies breakdown, and the shortlist of tools sits in best lease abstraction software.
Still have questions? Our team is happy to help.
Talk to our teamYes, if the general requirements for nonattest services in AICPA ET section 1.295.040 are met. The client must not delegate management responsibilities, must designate someone with suitable skills, knowledge, or experience to oversee the work, must evaluate the results, and must accept responsibility. Document the understanding in writing first.
Yes. Reading a client lease and summarizing its terms into a schedule is a nonattest service, in the same family as bookkeeping and financial statement preparation. It is permitted for an attest client under the AICPA general requirements, provided the firm does not take on management responsibilities.
The lease term including reasonably certain options, the lease payments over that term with escalations, and a discount rate for the liability. For the right of use asset, add initial direct costs, prepaid rent, and lease incentives such as a tenant improvement allowance.
Manually, about four to eight hours for a complex commercial lease with amendments, and under an hour for a short equipment schedule. AI extraction returns the same fields in minutes, with the review step scaling to how much of the population your team chooses to test.
No. There is no amortization schedule, journal entry, or subledger here. This is the document reading step that produces the term, payments, and options your calculation engine or firm template works from, and it is useful before a client has selected any platform.
Yes. The fields extracted from the document are substantially the same. What differs is the reporting: governmental lessees recognize a lease liability and an intangible right to use asset, and governments are lessors far more often, which brings that side into scope too.
Yes, and on an attest engagement that is often the cleaner arrangement. The client uploads their own documents, reviews the source linked fields, and owns the resulting schedule, which keeps the oversight and responsibility requirements straightforward to evidence.
The platforms that calculate from the data you abstract.
Learn moreFor firms carrying governmental audit clients.
Learn moreThe step by step data preparation workflow.
Learn moreRunning a whole client population at once.
Learn moreThe full field list behind a lease abstract.
Learn moreThe honest shortlist, including where we do not win.
Learn more