The Aptitude Lease Accounting Engine is a pre-packaged and purpose-built lease accounting solution, delivering IFRS 16 and ASC 842 compliance and core lease management capabilities for the most complex leasing requirements. Aptitude’s lease accounting software is flexible, highly configurable and integrates seamlessly with existing systems, finance workflows and surrounding architecture.

We offer accounting domain expertise that lease management vendors will not be able to provide consistently, if at all. In addition, we are significantly larger than most of the lease management vendors and have therefore been able to invest sufficiently in a greater number of resources to support this regulatory accounting requirement. This is in direct contrast to our competitors who may be resource constrained.

Our Strategic Finance Advisory (SFA) team is composed of former controllers, auditors, and technical accountants. This team is responsible for the specification of our accounting solutions and work closely with our partners and customers to validate models and interpretations of the standards we support in line with the regulations globally.

The Aptitude Lease Accounting Engine supports lessee, lessor, IFRS 16, ASC 842, IAS 17 and ASC 840. It supports leases of all asset classes (equipment, real estate) as well as all lease types (sublease, intercompany, variable payment.) All calculations and associated methodologies have been approved by two of the big 4 advisory firms as being fully compliant with IFRS 16 and ASC 842. No shortcuts have been taken in terms of design or calculation methodology.

Aptitude Software has contracted with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its IAAS vendor. Aptitude Software has a dedicated global support organization which serves as a single point of contact for incidents and related processes.

Our development roadmap is based on customer needs, regulatory impacts and application of accounting best practices as they evolve. Typically, we have 2 major releases per year.

Similar to all of our competitors, these releases, based on the evolution of the standard, might be more frequent over the next 6-9 months. For our cloud-based offering of ALAE, upgrades will be applied by Aptitude Software when authorized by the customer. Customers do not need to take each release but instead can take an approach that works for their business. Upgrades are included in the Annual Subscription Fee.

Since ALAE is cloud-based, the new release would be made available in a sandbox environment after agreeing to a timeframe for testing. Customers would then have time to test the release, confirm there are no negative impacts and then mutually agree with Aptitude on a date for pushing that release into the production instance.

Since ALAE is a cloud-based lease accounting software, Aptitude handles upgrade releases. Customers can then test the new release related to their individual configurations.

Yes, Aptitude Software runs a number of User Groups for its clients including a group for ALAE users.

We have established global partnerships with large consulting firms who work with our experts to provide specialist resources around the world. We have close alliances with the Big 4 and have delivered projects with Deloitte, KPMG, EY and many of the regional firms including CFGI. We would be happy to work with your preferred partner.

We have built a library of reusable project accelerators and assets to support the design and configuration phases of the project. These include a data model, ALAE project plans and standard status reporting templates. Implementations are carried out using the agile methodology and dev-ops, providing quick time to benefit and lower risk.

Aptitude Software ALAE projects are staffed by Functional and Technical Leads from Aptitude’s Lease Accounting competency center, as well as Centre of Excellence functional and technical resources that would travel onsite for the scoping workshops of the design phase. Read more about our delivery team.

We are experienced in managing client’s varying requirements for transitions. Consequently, the Aptitude lease accounting solution supports a variety of transition options including both the Full Retrospective and Modified Retrospective approaches under IFRS 16.

A sandbox environment allows you to run parallel reporting to transition from existing lease accounting and the solution supports finance workflows including reporting, reconciliations and scenario modelling which allows for better decision making.

The ALAE provides three methods of data entry: individual record/contract entry via the web user interface, mass spreadsheet upload via the web user interface and interfaces to support automatic data transfer from external systems.

The interfaces for automatic data transfer are pre-defined input database tables (called hoppers) which act as a landing zone for data that the engine will process. A separate tool with ETL capabilities can be used to transfer data between source systems and ALAE’s hoppers. Additionally, properly structured flat files may be submitted via SFTP for automatic consumption into the hoppers by the ALAE processes.

Yes, the ALAE includes extended attributes which can be configured by business users to capture business specific details. This includes the ability to configure at the contract header and line levels on an entity basis. Accounting policy is fully configurable within the engine rather than being hardcoded into the data model or application processing.

The Aptitude Lease Accounting Engine provides standard input structures for this type of data (FX rates, payment schedules, indices) along with a detailed interface guide. ALAE also has the ability to centrally manage and control FX rates.

Similarly, ALAE is designed to be agnostic of any particular ERP system. However, we have extensive experience in designing products that support integration with ERP systems, General Ledgers and accounting hubs. For example, SAP, Oracle, Aptitude Accounting Hub, JD Edwards, etc. ALAE generates accounting entries (credits and debits) at the level of the contract component (leased asset, service component, etc). It can generate, different sets of accounting entries for different entities. These entries can then be summarized and mapped to the appropriate GL. These outputs can be created per entity.

This is fully supported within the ALAE.