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It Figures: The CRI Podcast

It Figures Podcast: S3:E11 – CentraLease | GASB & FASB Lease Compliance Made Easy

Centralizing your organization’s lease data is more important than ever. If your organization is struggling to keep up with the ongoing changes to GASB & FASB compliance standards, it’s time to implement a centralized lease software. CentraLease powered by CRI Advanced Analytics is a user-friendly and cost-effective option that allows your organization to achieve actionable and retrievable data at your fingertips. Tune in to this episode of It Figures as CRI Senior Managers Jessica Ortiz and David Knowlton summarize a few client success stories and unravel the benefits of using real-time lease compliance software.

Intro:

From Carr, Riggs & Ingram, this is It Figures: The CRI podcast, an accounting, advisory, and industry focused podcast for business and organization leaders, entrepreneurs, and anyone who is looking to go beyond the status quo.

CentraLease:

Maintain compliance with ease by utilizing highly centralized, effortlessly configurable, and fundamentally simplistic lease data with CentraLease, powered by CRI Advanced Analytics. Centrally locating your lease agreements within our cloud based software provides you with access to real time actionable dashboards at your fingertips. Our user friendly software caters to those business professionals looking for a hassle free and cost effective lease compliance experience. Head over to crianalytics.com to learn more.

Jessica Ortiz:

Welcome to another CRI podcast. My name is Jessica Ortiz. I’m a Senior Audit Manager from the Houston office, and today I have David Knowlton. Welcome David.

David Knowlton:

Hey, thanks Jessica. I’m David Knowlton and I’m a Senior Manager in our Melbourne, Florida office.

Jessica Ortiz:

Today we’re going to be talking about CentraLease, and let’s just start with an overview. How exactly does it work, David?

David Knowlton:

Sure. CentraLease is a cloud-based realtime dashboard tool that allows you to upload your lease data in seconds and automatically assure GASB and FASB compliance. It’s priced really competitively and it’s a very user friendly experience that makes it a great solution to anyone’s leasing compliance need.

Jessica Ortiz:

That sounds great. So what about our professionals, our business professionals, or our clients that are currently looking to implement the new lease standard? What would you say its best features?

David Knowlton:

Sure. So it includes the ability to save data preferences and download comprehensive reports within CentraLease. So you do the data entry once and you’ve got the ability to run reports as you need it, whether it’s monthly, quarterly, annually, and for lots of different purposes, such as compliance, auditing, or budget and forecasting. So you can run those reports looking prospectively and help budget your future cash flows and future revenues in future years. So it’s a great tool not only for compliance, but also on the budgeting and forecasting side.

Jessica Ortiz:

So for our business professionals, our clients that are currently probably in the process of implementing the new standard, what would you say is the best features of CentraLease?

David Knowlton:

Sure. We’ve got a government that’s got a number of leases and a really small accounting or finance department. So they’re using CentraLease because it’s a really affordable solution and it saves them a ton of time.

So again, you don’t have to rerun the options for the leasing every year. You can just run a report at year end if it’s for audit purposes. And then for them, where budgeting and forecasting is the same folks that are doing the accounting, it’s great for them because during the other part of the year outside of audit, when they need to develop their budgets for the next year and the next five years, they can look forward and see what leases they have and what the escalation and the future revenue is without manually recalculating that every year. And it’s also great because it has all of your leases in a single location. So if you’re charged with managing leases and you’ve got a bunch of them, it’s helpful to know when those leases expire so that you can get a heads up on them and whether put it off to legal or whoever you need to do to start working on renegotiating those leases for the upcoming term,

Jessica Ortiz:

That’s a win-win. If we talk about cost, pricing, some of our clients might not have the internal bandwidth to implement a centralized data solution like CentraLease. What would you tell them just to convince them this is the option? How important is this for our businesses that needs to be GASB or FASB compliant?

David Knowlton:

Sure. So CentraLease is a very affordable option, and I think it’s especially helpful in a situation like you just described when you’ve got limited personnel to handle the task. So you don’t have to manually calculate your journal entries, your adjustments, your future amortizations. Once you’ve entered all of the data into CentraLease, it’s going to generate those reports for you. And, again, all your leases are in a single location. So whether you’re doing regulatory compliance, audit compliance, or forecasting future budget needs and revenue cash flows, it’s all there in one place, which is great when you’ve got a small shop and a limited budget.

Jessica Ortiz:

Makes sense. So from your perspective, David, what does the future of GASB and FASB compliance standards looks like? How do you think a solution like this will continue to be relevant for a business in need?

David Knowlton:

Sure. So while the leasing standard has been applicable to the public companies for the past couple of years, it’s just now becoming applicable to a lot of the private companies and for the governments. And there’s been additional auditing standard updates and then GASB statements that have further modified and changed the gap related to leasing. So it’s nice that all this is incorporated into CentraLease. You don’t have to read through and dig through every EASU to see if it impacts you, when it’s automatically being updated on the backside. And then when you’re looking at the initial implementation of this, it’s a huge task to go through all of your leases, calculate all this amortization, your journal entries, and figure out how you’re going to implement it, when instead you can just put it all in the CentraLease and generate a report and it outputs all that data for you.

Jessica Ortiz:

Awesome. So to me, if you ask me a summary will be, this is a great option, very easy to use ,competitive pricing. So let’s talk about getting set up with our product. Who do I call? Where do I need to go?

David Knowlton:

Sure. Yeah. If you’re already a CRI client or if you’d like to become one, just head over to our website, cricpa.com and locate your local CRI professional in your CRI office. And we can get you set up and get going. And if you’re a new client and you can go straight over to crianalytics.com, head over to the product page where you can learn more about CentraLease and contact our team to sign up.

Jessica Ortiz:

Excellent, David. Thank you so much for your time.

David Knowlton:

Yeah. Thanks, Jessica. It was great.

Outro:

If you want more CRI insights, or are interested in learning about our firm, please visit our website at cricpa.com. Thanks for listening to this episode of It Figures: The CRI Podcast. You can subscribe to It Figures on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you prefer to listen to your podcasts. If you liked what you heard today, please leave us a review.

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