Why Ecologic For Lessees?
You Get Visibility, Control, Compliance, Risk Management, Economics, Results, and Confidence
Get proven controls, know your options, and sign financial statements with confidence
In most companies, leasing is a decentralized activity lacking centralized controls. Ecologic brings your leasing activities together by centralizing the controls around your business process for financing capital expenditures. Ecologic provides the tools, resources and knowledge to help you manage risk and compliance, gain greater visibility, control costs, and drive better economics in each transaction and your overall portfolio. You'll have proof that your financings are competitive and shrewd. With Ecologic, you’ll be able to demonstrate controls and compliance to any authority so you can sign-off on your financial reports and disclosures with confidence – every time.
Ecologic solves these lessee problems – Which ones do you need to fix?
- Problem: Poor Controls and Compliance – Finance executives are worried about compliance and controls because they don't know who is signing leases, what the terms of the leases are, if they meet compliance standards, if the economics were negotiated shrewdly, where the lease documents are located, or where the assets are located. They can't generate the reports to perform the analysis because they don't have the data. Discover Ecologic's Solution...
- Problem: Still Using Spreadsheets – Finance executives have little to no visibility because the company is still using spreadsheets for portfolio management and ad hoc reporting. And spreadsheets are prone to errors. Discover Ecologic's Solution...
- Problem: Overpaying – Finance executives believe their company is overpaying for their leases, or they are unsure if they are being penalized, or they don't understand their end of term risks. They know they are not properly negotiating the lease terms upfront or managing mid-term events, the end-of-term of the lease, or the end-of-life of the assets. For example, they can't return the assets at the end-of-the lease. As a result, the finance executives are unclear about their financial and legal exposure. Discover Ecologic's Solution...
- Problem: High Capital Costs – Finance executives believe they are not demanding the best terms or the lowest cost of capital in a controlled, competitive financing process and probably leaving money on the table. Discover Ecologic's Solution...
- Problem: Can't track docs or assets – Finance executives can't track docs, assets, or accounting because they don't have the software they need to controll processes, manage their portfolio, and perform closed-loop, asset-level lease accounting. Discover Ecologic's Software Services...
- Problem: AP Can't Manage Lease Invoices – Your Accounts Payable team can not manage the lease invoicing process properly resulting in over- or under-allocation to Purchase Orders, accounting problems, payment delays, and frustrated lessors. On top of this, you are constantly managing a crisis, and the deluge of email and phone calls never stop. Discover Ecologic's Solution...
Fix compliance problems - sign-off on financial disclosures with confidence; centralize controls while enabling your users to continue their decentralized leasing workflow
The problem: Finance executives are worried about compliance and controls because they don't know who is signing leases, what the terms of the leases are, if they meet compliance standards, if the economics were negotiated shrewdly, where the lease documents are located, or where the assets are located. They can't generate the reports to perform the analysis because they don't have the data.
The Ecologic solution: Ecologic outsourced equipment finance solutions deliver strong, clear controls and compliance management to help you produce accurate note disclosure for minimum lease payments and improve your overall compliance reporting. While the controls are centralized, we adapt our services to your business processes. Your internal users can still perform their work in a distributed manner, but you don't have to worry about compliance any longer.
In many companies, the leasing process is decentralized due to fragmented processes and systems, poor controls, inaccessible accounting details, lack of standardization, poor data quality and inaccurate reporting. This causes exposure to cost leakage and compliance failures.
Our solution streamlines your compliance management, providing an integrated combination of processes, procedures, accounting expertise, and technology that ensures your adherence to Master Lease Agreements, US sales tax and property taxes, Canadian taxes, insurance, corporate tax, FASB/CICA, GAAP, Sarbanes-Oxley, SEC, COSO, and other standards.
Ecologic also helps you standardize, document, and communicate corporate policy and compliance procedures for equipment finance processes. And our software services provide complete traceability of all people, events, documents, data, and communications for every transaction.
Our software services help you track and manage assets and leases, providing accurate "closed-loop" asset-level accounting with incremental line-item reconciliation of all documents; recording of debits and credits and reconciling with your General Ledger; and reconciliation among other internal and external systems.
We also track organizational changes and asset changes, and test for appropriate characterization of assets and transactions. This improves the accuracy of annual premiums based on replacement value of assets within a geographical area and/or legal entity, if lessor book-values are requested.
By reducing allocation errors between legal entities (overstatement and understatement of sales and corporate tax liability) and allocation errors due to incorrect physical location, we help ensure the auditability of your lease and asset portfolio.
Eliminate spreadsheets and ad hoc reporting – gain visibility, better business performance, and confidence
The problem: Finance executives have little to no visibility because the company is still using spreadsheets for portfolio management and ad hoc reporting.
The Ecologic solution: Ecologic’s centralized, automated solutions provide full-lifecycle lease transaction, asset, and portfolio management. The result: Improved visibility for better and faster budgeting, forecasting, profitability analysis, decision-making, and business performance.
Our software eliminates ad hoc spreadsheets and databases and delivers visibility through a robust lease accounting sub ledger and other sophisticated accounting capabilities. At the same time, integration with your internal systems reduces keystrokes, errors, and improves productivity. And all stakeholders – internal and external - can collaborate throughout the lifecycle of a lease or an asset, enabling reporting at all levels with consistent data elements throughout the entire enterprise.
Stop overpaying, avoid penalties, and eliminate disposal risks – manage your portfolio AT ALL TIMES
The problem: In many companies, finance executives believe their company is overpaying for their leases, are unsure if they are being penalized, or don't understand their end of term risks. They also believe they are not properly negotiating the lease terms upfront, managing mid-term events, the end-of-term of the lease, and the end-of-life of the assets. As a result they are unclear about their financial and legal exposure. Lessors make most of their money at the end of term when lessees miss their notice requirements, continue to pay monthly invoices beyond the term, or extend the lease. And when lessees don’t read or understand the details of their lease agreements, they may be forced to pay steep penalties for mid-term or partial buyouts, end-of-term balloons, unjustifiably high fair market value quotes, or onerous return provisions. Poor accounting of leases and assets at the end of term can result in audit deficiencies and fraud. Improper disposition of assets can lead to fines, penalties, lawsuits, and tarnish a good reputation.
The Ecologic solution: Ecologic saves our clients money by properly managing all dimensions of their leases and assets throughout the lifecycle of the agreement. We seek to minimize any penalties or risks by carefully negotiating the lease agreement language. And we automate compliance of most lease agreement terms so nothing is overlooked, from beginning to end.
We also provide comprehensive end-of-term and end-of-life management. When a lease comes to term we minimize the required fair market value by bringing comparative third-party bids to drive down the funder’s proposed rate.
In addition to reducing the funder’s quote, this enables our clients to compare the cost-benefits of buying back versus reselling the equipment. We also provide the inventory accounting, make any adjustments and depreciate the assets as appropriate. And just prior to the end of life of an asset, we work with our global alliance partners who specialize in asset remarketing and disposal to proactively market the assets.
Through this process we manage our clients’ waste-stream risks while maximizing the residual value they can extract from the asset. At our clients’ discretion, our alliance partners will assume the environmental liability and asset responsibility from the time they pick up the equipment at their shipping dock; from that moment on, our partner is responsible for any investigation, litigation or claims settlements related to the removed asset. We also protect our clients’ reputation by collecting and filing a certificate of destruction for any disposed assets, to avoid any claims of environmental or security law violations.
These end-of-term and end-of-life services decrease the cost of ownership, bring our clients additional revenue opportunities from the resale, eliminate penalties and disposal risks, and improve inventory and end-of-life accounting.
Break the grip of monopolistic leasing company – get the best financing terms through competition
The problem: Many companies still work with only one or two funders, while others have Master Lease Agreements (MLAs) with 30+ funders across North America. Finance executives believe they are not demanding the best terms or the lowest cost of capital in a controlled, competitive financing process and probably leaving money on the table.
The Ecologic solution: Financing transactions should be managed and negotiated by a team of trained financial experts. Ecologic’s leasing professionals have deep expertise in credit analysis, pricing, structuring, financing, and syndication. They work with our clients to develop the best strategies for their business, and then develop programs and manage the equipment financing processes to meet their needs.
We systematically and routinely compete funders as appropriate for our clients’ business strategies, and manage their performance for the life of the program. Ecologic maintains a centralized database of over 150 funders in North America alone with whom we engage at some level over the course of a year. Whenever possible, we work with the "buy-desk" to avoid the sometimes-costly internal origination fees that banks and leasing companies pay to sales people.
We provide our clients with a transparent, side-by-side ("apples-to-apples") comparative analysis of proposals so they can decide the best path forward. We then facilitate the negotiation, selection, documentation, and on-going performance evaluation of the funder, working closely with our clients so they have the greatest comfort and confidence.
Ecologic's Software Services: LeaseAccelerator™
Ecologic’s LeaseAccelerator software services platform gives our clients the capabilities they need to streamline, automate, and manage their financing and leasing processes for greater visibility, scaleability, consistency and control.
LeaseAccelerator™ is a web-enabled, automated, integrated, and secure service that supports the end-to-end process of leasing and asset tracking by facilitating and accelerating lease transactions, especially the document and data flows among the multiple parties involved in a lease.
The system’s workflow, document management, and transaction processing capabilities accelerate funder review and acceptance. And it automatically links together documents in the supply chain, making them accessible by schedule or asset to any authorized stakeholder.
Ecologic's outsourcing team, our clients, and their lessors use LeaseAccelerator to create, exchange, and track acquisition requests, purchase orders, asset assignment and notification documents, certificates of acceptance, and lease schedules. They use LeaseAccelerator to perform Lease Vs. Buy and FAS 13 analyses, create and distribute solicitations (RFPs), and analyze and award proposals. Lessors use LeaseAccelerator to prepare and submit their proposals.
Ecologic's outsourcing team, our clients also use LeaseAccelerator™ to perform step-by-step line item reconciliation and coding, asset-based lease accounting, and portfolio management, including compliance assurance, asset tracking, and end-of-term notifications and process management. It provides an automated service for tracking and managing leases, assets, and risk, complete with robust, Web-based reporting capabilities.
To protect up-time and access to our software services, Ecologic uses geographically distributed hosting facilities with redundant back-up and fail-over capabilities. We also provide security at the data, application, system, and network levels.
Help your AP team pay on time by outsourcing lease invoice processing and reconciliation to Ecologic; we have the data and automated tools to do it faster and easier; If AP is happier, your lessors are happier, and fewer people are calling you, wouldn't you be happier, too?
The problem: Your Accounts Payable team can not manage the lease invoicing process properly resulting in over- or under-allocation to Purchase Orders, accounting problems, payment delays, and frustrated lessors. On top of this, you are constantly managing a crisis and the deluge of email and phone calls never stop.
The Ecologic solution: On a monthly basis, Ecologic will reconcile the data in your Purchase Order system, with the data provided by each lessor from their lease system (or web-based reporting service) and the data in the General Ledger of your ERP system to ensure the data is up-to-date and accurate in each of the systems before the lessor sends the invoice.
Although it may not be the intention of a lessee, over the life of a lease there are many changes that inevitably take place in big companies that impact a lease, including the movement of assets and changes in cost-centers and G/L codes. As a result, one PO or one lease schedule can have many cost centers and GL codes attributed to it. Using automated notifications and routine audits, LeaseAccelerator makes it easy for each cost center owner and asset user to confirm the accuracy of each asset and the allocation at the asset level. Ecologic can then validate that the correct cost center, G/L code, and project code have been properly applied to each asset and verify that each asset is properly linked to the correct monthly rental, PO, and lease schedule.
When Ecologic receives the invoice, Ecologic has already done the legwork that will ensure the accuracy of the data in all relevant systems. We perform the reconciliation procedures and generate the reconciliation report and provide it to AP. AP checks the report (i.e. performs the compensating control) and makes the payment. Ensuring consistency and accuracy between the Lessor and Lessee systems for critical data elements such as location, and periodic rentals, and between LeaseAccelerator and ERP’s for cost centers and GL codes provides the level of control and auditability that is required, but often not existing in organizations today.
Finally, Ecologic makes the invoice available in .pdf format in LeaseAccelerator. Each invoice is linked to all the executed documents, blanket invoice approvals, and data related to the invoice.
If your leasing procure-to-pay process is locked down and automated with LeaseAccelerator and Ecologic's AP centralization and reconciliation outsourcing service just like this, wouldn't your life be easier? Here is an added bonus: It likely costs much less than what you are paying to manage your lease invoices today.
