Lease abstraction where every number is tied to its clause and every judgement is signed by a person
Leases on the books with every number tied to its clause, and every judgement signed.
See one case, screen by screen ↓Lease abstraction is reading a lease and its amendments and pulling out the terms that matter — dates, rent and escalations, free rent, incentives, options and notice dates — into structured data, so the lease can be accounted for under ASC 842 or IFRS 16. Lease Abstraction does it with eight agents that cite every term to its page, build the payment schedule and accounting values, re-read every payment, and bring each judgement to the lease accountant to decide and sign.
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A lease is 60–90 pages, plus amendments, a work letter and side letters. To account for it under ASC 842 or IFRS 16, someone has to find the commencement date, every rent step and free month, the incentives and the options, apply each amendment in order, build the monthly payment schedule, pick the discount rate and key it all into the lease subledger. A lease accountant does that by hand, lease after lease, on top of the close.
The judgements are the hard part, and the reasons behind them are often lost in a spreadsheet: is the renewal reasonably certain, will the termination right be used, does an amendment add a right of use at a market price? When something is missed, it surfaces as an audit finding: a lease missing from the population because it sat inside a 3PL or colocation contract, the wrong lease term, the wrong rate, or an amendment that was never remeasured.
Estimated split for one office lease with an amendment, by hand and with the solution, in hours. The working solution's sample lease took 6 min 12 s of agent time and a 14-minute review.
Eight agents read, cite, schedule and re-check every lease; the lease accountant decides every judgement and signs.
Kestrel & Vane Services has signed a 10-year lease for Floor 12 at 400 Market Street, Columbus — 24,000 rentable sq ft from Ashgrove Market Partners — and a First Amendment that moves its start. Here is what happens next, screen by screen, in the working solution.
Grace's day opens as messages from the agents, each with one next step: 3 decisions need her, 14 documents were read overnight, and the next notice date is in 62 days. At the top, the judgement agent says 400 Market Street needs one decision: 46 terms cited, 120 of 120 payments confirmed, and an open question on the renewal.
“Everything else is checked: 46 terms cited, 120 of 120 payments confirmed. The open question is whether the 5-year renewal is reasonably certain.”
Three signed documents arrive from the e-signature system: the Office Lease (64 pages, signed Aug 18), the First Amendment (4 pages, Sep 22) and the Work Letter (11 pages). The intake agent groups them in date order and checks every page is present and signed. The abstraction agent reads 46 terms in 3 min 40 s; two come from the amendment — commencement moves from Oct 1 to Nov 1, 2026, and storage rent from $1,150 to $1,250 a month.
Lowest confidence is 0.91, on the operating-expense base year — it doesn't change the schedule, because those costs are variable.
Every value carries a citation. Grace clicks the one on the new commencement date and the First Amendment opens at page 1, §1, with the passage highlighted: the Commencement Date is November 1, 2026, the landlord's work having been delayed by permit review. From there she can ask the agents about the passage or open the whole document.
120 monthly payments, Nov 2026 to Oct 2036: base rent free for six months (§4.3), then $96,000.00 a month (§4.1), rising 3% each Lease Year (§4.2), plus storage. Free rent, each step, the termination and renewal notices and expiry are marked in the margin, each linked to its clause. At the treasury's 10-year rate of 6.10%, the lease liability is $9,316,607 and the right-of-use asset $8,939,807, after the $376,800 allowance.
Operating expenses and the $192,000 deposit are left out of the schedule: they are not lease payments.
The checker re-reads all three documents on its own: 120 of 120 payments agree, and so do 14 of 14 dates and options. One difference is settled from the documents themselves — the first draft took storage at $1,150 from the lease, but the First Amendment replaced it with $1,250 from commencement. Both readings stay on the record, and the terms screen marks each amended term with both citations.
The checker never overwrites a value silently. A difference it cannot settle from the documents goes to a person.
There is a 5-year renewal at 95% of market rent, notice due by Oct 31, 2035. The agent weighs the four kinds of factor in ASC 842-10-55-26, each cited: the rent is close to market; the landlord's allowance paid for most of the improvements; about 21% of Class A space is available; Real Estate has no plan to stay beyond 2036. It recommends leaving the renewal out, and shows both: 120 months at 6.10%, or 180 months at 6.45% with a right-of-use asset of $12,319,743.
The judgement agent never decides a judgement. It always shows both treatments.
Grace asks the agents in plain words. The schedule agent answers in the thread: at 6.40% the lease liability would be $9,179,832, $136,775 lower, and year-1 interest $593,675. It points out that 6.10% is the treasury's 10-year rate in table DR-2026-10, and offers to propose 6.40% as an edit.
“Nothing has changed on the record.”
Grace excludes the renewal with reason code J-02, “No significant economic incentive to renew”, and e-signs. Only then do the agents export: the lease is created in the lease subledger, the commencement journal is scheduled for Nov 1, the notice dates go to the real estate calendar with reminders to Marcus Delaney, and the evidence is sealed for the auditor — 46 citations, 120 checked payments, the decision and the signature.
“On the books for Nov 1 — 18 days before the lease starts. Agent time 6 min 12 s, your review 14 minutes.”
Signed Oct 6 for the Memphis distribution center, the amendment extends the lease 5 years and adds a 24,000 sq ft annex. The change watcher tests each part against ASC 842-10-25-8: the extension adds no right of use, so it is a modification — the liability goes from $2,431,590 to $6,755,232 at the revised 7-year rate of 6.25%. The annex is new space at $6.40 a sq ft against a broker survey of $6.35–6.55, so it is a separate lease, L-US-0287-A, with a liability of $959,416.
Draft entry, Nov 1, 2026: Dr right-of-use asset $4,323,642 · Cr lease liability $4,323,642 — nothing posts until a second person signs.
Grace approves the remeasurement with reason code M-01. Because the change is over $2M, it waits at the top of Helena's quarter close, with the separate-contract test behind it. The same screen shows her Q3 sign-off: every new lease, modification and termination decided, a roll-forward from $412.6M to $433.6M that ties to the subledger and the ERP, and drafted disclosures in which every number opens its source.
The same quarter's leases, seen by the four people who carry them — what the work looked like, and what it looks like now.
Eight agents read, cite, schedule and re-check every lease; the lease accountant decides every judgement and signs.
Collects leases, amendments and work letters from e-signature, the leases mailbox, the document repository and uploads, groups them into one lease in date order, and finds duplicates, missing pages, unsigned drafts and the language.
Reads the lease and every amendment in order and abstracts 46 terms, each cited to its document, page and paragraph, with a confidence. Where an amendment replaces a clause, it keeps both citations and marks the term as amended.
Turns the terms into monthly cash flows, takes the rate from the treasury's discount-rate table for the term and currency, and computes the lease liability, right-of-use asset, straight-line cost, interest and maturities under ASC 842 and IFRS 16.
Re-reads the lease without seeing the first answers, rebuilds the cash flows and confirms every payment, date and option row by row. It settles a difference only from the documents, such as a later amendment, and records both readings.
Finds every renewal, termination and purchase option, computes each treatment, weighs the contract, asset, entity and market factors with citations, and recommends one.
Reads every signed amendment, renewal and termination, tests each part against the separate-contract rule with citations, computes before and after values at the revised rate and drafts the entry.
Keeps the notice calendar from the abstracts, reminds the real estate manager at 180, 90, 30 and 10 days, shows what each choice does to the books and drafts the notice letter once a decision is recorded.
Reads supplier contracts in force — 3PL, colocation, on-site supply — against the definition of a lease: an identified asset, no real right to substitute it, the economic benefits and the right to direct its use, each tested to the clause, with an estimated liability.
Decides every judgement; controller signs the quarter. The agents propose; a named person decides.
Ask about any lease, payment, option or date — or tell the agents what to change. Every answer cites the clause, and nothing changes the record until a person approves it.
Which leases start this month?
Two leases start in the next 30 days, both on Nov 1, 2026: 400 Market Street, Floor 12 — liability $9,316,607, waiting for your decision on the renewal — and the forklift fleet, Schedule 7 — liability $1,488,655, ready to approve.
Why exclude the renewal?
In short, nothing pulls Kestrel & Vane into staying. The renewal is at 95% of market rent, the landlord paid for most of the build-out, there's comparable space around, and Real Estate plans to leave in 2036. That's why I recommend J-02. If Marcus's plan changes, I will ask you to reassess.
Which notice is due next?
The next notice is Monterrey Plant 2: renewal notice due Dec 15, 2026, in 62 days. Marcus Delaney decides; I've shown him what each choice does to the books.
Where do the agents disagree?
One lease has two readings open: São Paulo, rent index IPCA in the lease against IGP-M in the second amendment. This quarter I agreed with the first reading on 98.6% of terms.
13 screens from the working solution, on its sample data. Pick one to see it large.
The elections and thresholds the agents apply are settings. Every change is logged with the old and new value, and policy and rate changes need the controller.
| Setting | Default | Choose from |
|---|---|---|
| Short-term exemption | On | On · Off — leases of 12 months or less with no purchase option reasonably certain stay off the balance sheet |
| Combine lease and non-lease parts — property | Off: fixed service charges are split out | On · Off |
| Combine lease and non-lease parts — equipment | On: maintenance in a fleet lease stays in the payment | On · Off |
| Capitalisation threshold, equipment | $25,000 | Any amount; leases below it are expensed |
| Confidence below which a person reads the term | 0.90 | Any level; terms under it go to the lease accountant before the schedule is built |
| Second approval above | $2,000,000 | Any change in liability; above it the controller signs too |
| Notice-date reminders | 180, 90, 30 and 10 days | On · Off; escalates to the controller at 10 days |
| A second agent reads every lease | On | Locked: no lease reaches a person before the checker has re-read it |
Every figure is labelled: a target the solution is built to, an estimate, a typical published result, or a proven one.
“demo” = seen in the working solution, on its sample lease data · “target” = the design goal, measured in the live solution · “estimated” = our estimate · “typical” = published figures (RSM, Top 5 considerations when implementing an ASC 842 technology solution — two to six hours of abstraction per lease, more for foreign-language leases) · Standards named as context: ASC 842-10-15-3, 842-10-25-8 and 842-10-55-26; IFRS 16. Kestrel & Vane Group, Ashgrove Market Partners LLC, Ashby & Rowe LLP and the people named on this page are fictional — characters and sample data in the working solution.
Lease abstraction is reading a lease and its amendments and pulling out the terms that matter — dates, rent and escalations, free rent, incentives, options and notice dates — into structured data, so the lease can be accounted for under ASC 842 or IFRS 16. Lease Abstraction does it with eight agents that cite every term to its page, build the payment schedule and accounting values, re-read every payment, and bring each judgement to the lease accountant to decide and sign.
The abstraction agent reads the lease and every amendment in date order. Where an amendment replaces a clause, it keeps both citations and marks the term as amended, so the abstract shows the lease as amended. The change watcher tests each signed amendment against the separate-contract rule (ASC 842-10-25-8) and drafts the remeasurement or the new lease.
No. The judgement agent weighs the contract, asset, entity and market factors with citations, computes both treatments and recommends one. The lease accountant decides with a reason code and an e-signature, and nothing is exported until she does.
A checker agent re-reads every lease without seeing the first answers, rebuilds the cash flows and compares them row by row with every date and option. It settles a difference only from the documents and keeps both readings; anything else goes to a person. On the sample lease, 120 of 120 payments and 14 of 14 dates and options agreed.
Yes. From one abstract the schedule agent computes the lease liability, right-of-use asset, straight-line cost, interest and maturities under ASC 842 and IFRS 16, for entities that keep both books. Index-linked rent, such as a CPI review, is remeasured under IFRS 16 and treated as a variable cost under ASC 842.
Yes. The hidden-lease finder reads supplier contracts in force — 3PL, colocation, on-site supply — and tests each for an identified asset, substitution rights, the economic benefits and the right to direct use, citing the clause for each. A person confirms or dismisses every candidate, and a dismissal keeps its reason for the auditor.
Yes. The agents read, compute and propose; people decide. Judgements, edits and remeasurements need a reason code, approvals need an e-signature, the controller co-signs anything over $2M, nothing posts until a person approves it, and the agents never send notices to landlords.
The Agentic Solution Engine builds and deploys it from your requirements and documents — your accounting policy, discount-rate tables and a sample of your signed leases — and it goes live once every quality gate has passed. We will walk you through it on your own leases first.
Every balance tied to its support, and every difference explained before anyone signs.
1-min demoFlux AnalysisEvery variance explained to within 5%, with cited drivers, before the board sees it.
1-min demoAccrual AutomationEvery accrual proposed with its proof by day one, checked so no cost is counted twice.
1-min demoWe'll run Lease Abstraction on a sample of your own signed leases and amendments.