Supporting the New Lease Accounting Guidelines with OneStream and Agium EPM

The clock is ticking, and the date is getting closer for private companies to adopt the new Lease Accounting guidelines under IFRS 16 and ASC 842.  As I mentioned in a prior article on this topic, lease accounting is one of the biggest accounting changes in the past few years.  While investors are gaining better insights into the lease liabilities of public companies, adopting the new guidelines has put some stress on organizations who need to comply.

But there’s good news for private companies.  They can learn a lot from the experiences of public companies who have already adopted the new guidelines.  A recent article published in Accounting Today highlighted some of the learnings.  These span from data gathering to impacts on internal controls. And of course, how companies are adopting new software technology to support the guidelines.

This last point was the topic of a recent webinar sponsored by OneStream featuring our partner, Agium EPM and our joint customer, Eurofiber.

Hosted by yours truly, the webinar highlighted how a growing number of organizations are aligning lease accounting with their financial consolidation and reporting process leveraging OneStream’s unified SmartCPM^TM platform, and a solution developed by Agium.  Here are some of the highlights from the webinar.

Modernizing Finance

To kick off the webinar, I provided a brief introduction to OneStream.  I highlighted the history of the company, our mission of delivering 100% customer success, and our rapid growth to over 350 customers in just a few years.

One of the keys to that growth is the power of the OneStream XF platform (see graphic below) which unifies financial consolidations, planning, reporting, analytics and data quality – all in a single application that replaces multiple legacy products. It was designed from the outset to take advantage of new technologies and to tap into the infinite scale of the cloud.   OneStream helps our customers “Modernize” Finance without disruption and without compromising on functionality or scalability.I also highlighted one of the “secret sauces” in OneStream XF that makes it a great foundation for handling lease accounting requirements – Relational Blending.  This capability allows customers to capture detailed data in relational tables, then perform calculations, reporting and analysis on that data via multidimensional cubes.  We let the data live where it belongs and present it to users in the format that makes the most sense.

Extending Your Investment

The OneStream MarketPlace enables customers to extend their investment with over 50 solutions that are available to download – configure – and deploy to address additional requirements.  These are not simple demos, frameworks or starter kits they are real OneStream developed and supported solutions. MarketPlace solutions include everything from simple productivity tools to robust functional solutions such as Account Reconciliations and People Planning that are often sold as separate products or modules by other vendors.

OneStream recently announced that we are opening up the MarketPlace to partner solutions, and the Lease Accounting solution developed by Agium EPM will be one of the 1st partner solutions available. Which brings us to the next segment of the webinar.

Eurofiber Aligns Lease Accounting with Financial Reporting 

I then introduced Jeroen Reuser, Director External Reporting & Financial Control at Eurofiber – an international provider of industry leading digital infrastructure and the largest open network provider in the Benelux region.

Eurofiber had implemented OneStream for financial consolidation and reporting, replacing Excel spreadsheets.  Their Lease Accounting was originally done in Excel, but that became too complicated – with over 300 lease contracts to keep track of.  While they evaluated some standalone lease accounting solutions, Eurofiber ultimately decided to extend their investment in OneStream and leverage the platform to address the new requirements.

Because OneStream was already implemented, the lease accounting project was completed in just 4 weeks.  By sharing the same dimensionality and meta data structure, the approach provides seamless integration with their financial reporting and additional opportunities for dashboarding, analysis, KPI reporting and more.

Leveraging their existing OneStream investment also provided a lower cost of ownership vs. alternative solutions.  And it was easy to get the users to adopt the solution, since they were already familiar with the software and it was just a small addition to their monthly workflow.  Of course, none of this would be possible without the solution provided by Agium EPM.

Leveraging the Expertise of Agium EPM

Peter van Ooik, Senior EPM Consultant with Agium EPM then joined the discussion to talk about Agium and their lease accounting solution, which they developed on the OneStream platform.

Agium is a OneStream Platinum partner with 175 experienced finance professionals and over 60 OneStream projects under their belt across 30 companies in 7 countries.  The Lease Accounting solution they developed on the OneStream platform has been deployed at 18 companies in both North America and EMEA.  The solution handles the following tasks:

• Load data from source to OneStream
• Data modelling and assessment
• Calculation of lease details
• Detailed reporting
• Generation of adjusting journal entries
• Export journals to ERP system (if needed)

Mr. van Ooik then provided a brief demonstration of the lease accounting solution and answered questions.  Customers who have deployed the Agium EPM Lease Accounting solution for OneStream have seen many benefits.  Some of these benefits include the following

• Lease accounting is aligned with financial reporting
• Consistency in calculating the lease accounting re-measurements
• Automatic generation of journal entries
• Ability to analyze the lowest level of the contract details
• Transparency for corporate staff
• Accurate tie-out reports and full audit trails
• Low cost by leveraging existing software investments
• Easy integration into budgeting and forecasting

An added benefit of the solution is fast time to value.  As was shared earlier in the webinar by Jeroen Reuser, organizations who have already adopted OneStream for financial consolidation, reporting, and planning can be up and running quickly with the Agium Lease Accounting solution.  It can be implemented in a matter of weeks, leveraging and extending the work that has already been done in OneStream.

Learn More

For public companies struggling to support the new lease accounting guidelines, or privately-held companies planning to implement the new guidelines, OneStream XF and the Agium EPM Lease Accounting solution can be the answer to your challenges.  It provides an elegant and cost-effective approach that aligns lease accounting with financial consolidation and reporting.  To learn more about the Lease Accounting solution from Agium EPM, watch the replay of the webinar or contact your local OneStream account representative or Agium EPM directly.