The management and administration of leases is a complex challenge for organizations of any size, from a landlord renting out a room to a corporation renting out airplanes. With a landscape characterized by multifaceted compliance requirements, diverse lease portfolios and fast-moving regulatory environment, it can be a struggle to track, analyze and report lease activities accurately.
Woodbridge, New Jersey-based Visual Lease was founded in 1996 specifically to address these challenges. While initially focused on just lease tracking and compliance, the company has since broadened its reach to include capacities like lease accounting and portfolio management in response to the shifting needs of the industry. These capabilities are housed on the Visual Lease platform, which integrates analytical tools enabling a holistic view of someone's lease portfolios, providing customized insights, with a suite of compliance tools that manages the routine processes of lease administration. This technical capacity is further enhanced by a strong emphasis on customer service and support.
Robert Michlewicz, CEO of Visual Lease, recently discussed the company's current projects, strategic direction and future vision with Accounting Today.
How would you best describe what your company does?
Michlewicz: Visual Lease provides proven SaaS solutions that empower organizations to leverage their lease portfolio for strategic financial and operational outcomes.
Our solutions enable clients to achieve a clear understanding of their lease records including associated obligations, risks and responsibilities to address their ever-changing business needs. With VL, organizations have the visibility and controls they need to mitigate risk, optimize value and minimize cost.
What is in your product line, and what is your flagship product?
Michlewicz: Our flagship product is a Lease Portfolio Management platform which serves as a centralized system of record for all lease financial, operational and legal data. It automates lease accounting and administration processes for corporate accounting, real estate, IT, equipment and other operation teams, making it easy for cross-functional teams to track and report on dynamic financial and operational datasets. The solution also serves as a sub-ledger for lease financials that maintains lease controls, automates calculations and ensures reports are correct and compliant with the accounting standards (ASC 842, GASB 87 and 96, and IFRS 16).
We also have two additional solutions: VL ESG Steward and Integrations Hub. Integrations Hub allows users to leverage lease data within the systems they already use (like an ERP or BI tool) and automate workflows across the business, simultaneously maintaining a single system of record across their lease portfolio, improving efficiency and data accuracy to drive better-informed decision-making.
VL ESG Steward is our newest solution, and the first of its kind within the lease accounting and administration space. It helps organizations consolidate the records needed to track their carbon footprint across commercial real estate, fleet, equipment and more, and report on the environmental impact of these assets in accordance with the new international sustainability standards from the ISSB, IFRS S1 and IFRS S2. VL ESG Steward also provides the visibility required to be able to effectively make changes to meet sustainability goals.
What was the last big initiative or project your company completed?
Michlewicz: ESG reporting has become an increasingly crucial part of asset management for organizations across the globe. But according to Deloitte, less than half of professionals say they are confident in the ability of their organizations' financial reporting teams to gather and report on environmental, social and governance financial metrics for regulatory compliance purposes, which is particularly concerning in light of the new international sustainability standards from the ISSB.
The question is this: Without visibility into their performance history, how can companies successfully determine reporting benchmarks and accomplish their ESG goals? Unfortunately, much like with the lease accounting process, the records required to track environmental impact are dynamic, complex and dispersed across organizations.
To address this emerging compliance need, Visual Lease launched its newest offering, VL ESG Steward, a carbon accounting and sustainability management solution for leased, owned and subleased assets. VL ESG Steward is an extension of the VL platform and converts consumption data of greenhouse gas emissions for confident and trustworthy calculations that comply with IFRS S1 and IFRS S2, and also, empower users to make decisions and pivots to address their sustainability goals.
What is the most exciting new thing you're working on?
Michlewicz: Our team is extremely excited about the work that we're doing around VL ESG Steward, which has been in progress for a while now. In fact, our team has been keeping a very close eye on the ESG landscape, having provided guidance on the ISSB exposure draft last year. We built the solution with these requirements in mind, and as a result, VL ESG Steward is the first solution available that can align real estate, procurement, facilities and finance teams in going beyond lease management and accounting compliance to focus on the environmental impact of their assets, projects and processes.
Being first to market, we offer our customers some unique benefits. Of course, when facing new reporting requirements, time is of the essence — businesses need to get a handle on their greenhouse gas inventory as it relates to leased, owned and other intangible assets across their portfolio. In addition to providing our customers with these extended capabilities, we're also working with a bench of early-adopter customers — Scribcor, Mistras Group Inc., and MDU Construction Services Group, to name a few — and partners to understand how we can continue to expand product functionality and increase our platform's value.
What differentiates your company from others similar to it? What makes you different? Unique, even?
Michlewicz: Informed by nearly three decades of experience, Visual Lease is the only end-to-end solution that effectively maximizes the value companies receive from their lease portfolio. Our platform is designed to meet the needs of every stakeholder that interacts with a company's lease records to reduce risk, drive confident and sustained compliance and provide the visibility required to make agile business decisions. Our solutions eliminate data silos by providing the most comprehensive, flexible and easy-to-use financial and operational reporting features in the market.
Given Visual Lease's history as a leading lease management solution, we uniquely provide companies with the ability to organize, track and eventually, report on the environmental impact of their owned and leased assets. And we were the first to market in our category to design a solution to help businesses quantify their emission data so that our customers have the opportunity to prepare for IFRS S1 and IFRS S2 long before they go into effect.
Our team is continuously working to expand our product capabilities and the value that we provide by closely collaborating with our growing community of customers and partners to ensure we are ahead of business needs that are on the horizon.
What is the biggest challenge facing companies like yours right now? How do you work to address it?
Michlewicz: Many technology companies aren't in a position where they can make several investments in any one area of the business. In fact, many are looking for opportunities to cut costs, and so it's on finance executives and leaders to identify solutions that can solve several critical business needs that not only meet today's needs, but also position and prepare them for what is yet to come.
We understand this challenge and strive to deliver long-term value that sets us apart from other providers. We achieve this in several ways — firstly, our team is continuously exploring innovative approaches to expand our platform based on valuable insights from our current customers and partners. Our software capabilities and our customer service are unparalleled, often serving as an extension of our customers' internal teams and resources.
We know it is a difficult time for businesses across industries, so we've developed specific solutions to address their pressing needs. Our offerings enable organizations to achieve a clear understanding of their lease records, helping them to easily maintain lease accounting compliance, minimize the risk of inaccurate financial reporting and failed audits, identify cost-saving opportunities and prepare for the new international sustainability standards from the ISSB. And as I mentioned earlier, there's more to come as we remain committed to consistently extending the value that we provide to our community of customers.
What is the biggest tech challenge facing accountants today?
On top of all their day-to-day responsibilities, it's challenging for accounting teams to keep up with new and emerging technologies — not only when it comes to identifying and implementing them, but also ensuring they receive maximum value from each system.
By prioritizing solutions with strong integration capabilities, accounting and finance teams can make their entire fintech stack work together, increasing their ROI. For example, consider what one of our customers, Newmark, accomplished with Visual Lease. Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Newmark had already built its digital core to bring in communications from a wide range of systems and then visualize it into actionable insights produced in easy-to-digest dashboards. This information empowered the group's clients to make quick, strategic decisions during a highly critical time. Thankfully, Newmark was already using Visual Lease and determined that they could further leverage the software to support their digital core project by integrating its digital core with Visual Lease's Integrations Hub. The Integrations Hub allowed users to automate data exchange across its lease records, ERPs, business intelligence tools and other systems of record to streamline the delivery of critical, time-sensitive business insights.
By leveraging Visual Lease's integration capabilities, Newmark was able to extend the value of VL, as well as its other ERPs and BI tools, ultimately increasing their return on each investment.
If you could telepathically transmit one (non-marketing or sales) sentence into the head of every accountant in the world, what would that sentence be?
Michlewicz: "Make it a priority to stay ahead of what's ahead." The biggest lesson learned for many when it comes to lease accounting compliance, and one that will undoubtedly apply to ESG reporting efforts, is there is no sense in waiting to get started. It's all too easy to underestimate a new effort or postpone progress until deadlines draw nearer, but that will almost always put an organization in a position where they are behind. Looking ahead to IFRS S1 and IFRS S2, which can be used for annual reports for 2024 onwards, companies should embrace technology that is designed to help them create and maintain a single system of lease records, implement robust lease controls and also, integrate with their larger fintech landscape. Doing so will protect the integrity of their data, ensuring calculations are accurate as assets and emission factors change, and also help unlock insights across systems and teams.
Visual Lease at a Glance:
Location: Woodbridge, New Jersey
Website:
Number of products: 4
Number of clients helped: 1,500+
Number of leases managed: 500,000+
This has been part of our regular Vendor Spotlight series. To see previous Vendor Spotlights,
