Here are the Primary Concerns Lx Contracts Will Help You Resolve and How
Lx Contracts ultimately helps resolve your primary pain points and keeping this objective in mind can help focus and excite your team throughout the implementation process. These include:
Compliance concerns
Lease accounting standards are complex and ever-changing, and the latest standards from the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), IASB and the Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB) – ASC 842, IFRS 16 and GASB No. 87 – are no exception. This raises consistent concerns for businesses, particularly as compliance deadlines approach and they find themselves struggling to catch up and facing failed implementations, fines, inaccurate reporting and unexpected implementation costs.
Lucernex can effectively address these concerns. For one, Lucernex has a 100% success rate getting clients live and into compliance, including over 200 in the last two years – which means you don’t have to fear a failed implementation. What’s more, Lucernex is verified by a leading independent 3rd party accounting firm as a compliant solution for handling these regulations. As such, it can help ensure that users:
- Meet the new financial reporting requirements under ASC 842 & IFRS 16
- Accurately classify leases as operating or finance using the FASB ASC 842 test
- Generate accounting schedules from a solution that has been verified by an independent 3rd party accounting firm
Centralization of data
The next concern is data cleanliness and centralization of data. Usually, a company’s data is neither accurate nor clean – and that can lead to lack of transparency, poor cost analysis and, ultimately, short-sighted capital planning and poor decision-making. This is a huge pain point and a reason why many organizations turn to a lease accounting software like Lucernex.
By taking the time to organize and centralize your data, processes and approval levels in Lucernex, you will be able to:
- Easily calculate your lease and expense obligations
- Track, manage and increase visibility into your entire real estate and equipment lease portfolio
- Mitigate risk and increase efficiency through automation, processes and workflows
- Integrate your lease data and adapt Lucernex to work seamlessly with your other business-critical systems like your ERP solution
- Gain a broader understanding of your lease and real estate capabilities
- Improve your cost analysis (KPIs) and benchmarking capabilities
Keep in mind, though, that this will take a lot of up-front leg work – but it’ll be worth the effort in the long-run.
Reporting capabilities
Because of the lack of centralized data, many organizations also deal with consequences like confusion, increased employee inefficiency and costly rework. They also often find themselves unable to create actionable reports or dashboards that can be used to forecast, improve cost analysis, set KPIs and improve operations.
Lx Contracts’ comprehensive, integrated and customizable reporting and analytics can resolve these concerns, helping organizations effectively forecast, budget and allocate funds. This, in turn, can save time, money and efficiency over time.
The Lx Contracts Implementation: Understanding Each Phase of Implementation
Understanding each phase of a Lx Contracts implementation – and preparing your team accordingly – can help you ensure a smooth implementation and make sure that you get the most out of this powerful tool.
Phase 1: Kick-Off
Preparing your organization for kick-off is all about due diligence. Make sure that you:
- Ask the right teams the right questions. What does your accounting department need, for example? Where are the gaps in your current software solutions? What functionalities are have-to-haves for your team to maximizer user adoption within your organization?
- Understand your current systems and processes. What will Lucernex have to integrate with?
- Explain your daily work and what tools your teams have. What day-to-day tasks would you like to optimize?
With this information in hand, Lucernex experts will be able to customize the tool with the functionality, features and capabilities your team needs to maximize ROI and achieve success.
Phase 2: Leading practice prep
During this phase, your team will review documents created by Accruent’s Professional Services (PS) team using Visio diagrams and documents. These documents will include best practice templates and a suggested set of workflows created based on processes that the PS team has seen work successfully for leading clients. These documents will explain how you could proceed with your implementation.
This phase not only introduces new workflow ideas but also potentially shortens the implementation time since using a pre-built, optimized workflow can often save time and maximize efficiency.
Phase 3: Leading practice walkthrough
During this phase, you will work with the Accruent team to decide on the configuration of the system based on the ‘homework’ you did in phase one.
The goal here, of course, is to make the Lx Contracts tool and the implementation as user-friendly, relevant, and useful as possible for your particular use case. That way, it will fit seamlessly into your existing processes and behaviors.
Phase 4: Conference room pilot (CRP) 1
If your contract includes a system conversion, this phase will involve a review of those data conversion efforts so you will be able to see what was moved and exactly how it’s organized.
Otherwise, this phase will serve as an initial review and sign-off on the system configuration thus far. You will also work with the team during this phase to integrate Lx Contracts with your existing business processes. In other words, this is when the ball really gets rolling.
Phase 5. Final CRP
This phase is client-driven (with some assistance from the Accruent team) so you can go through and make sure you understand exactly how to use your new system going forward. If there is a data conversion, this would be a final review and sign-off before the go live cut over.
The purpose of this final conference room pilot is to put the tool into practice, fine-tuning it and resolving any concerns or pain points that may have gone unnoticed during previous phases.
Phase 6: User acceptance testing (UAT)
During this phase, all involved parties will go through the test scripts – and, if necessary, create additional test scripts – to make sure that everything is configured correctly and that your team members can do what they are supposed to do.
Phase 7: Go live
During the “Go Live” phase, the Accruent team will turn on the system for everyone and execute the final cut over if there is a data migration. After this point, your team will begin executing their daily jobs and tasks with the Lucernex tool.
Phase 8: Go Live: "What’s Next" document meeting
This phase will include a review by the PS team on what was accomplished during the project and what the next steps should be over the next year. There may be suggestions of other services that could help your team during this phase. For example, you may find, after implementation, that you’re worried about your software becoming dated or siloed. If this is the case, the appropriate solutions would be suggested during phase 8.
The Accruent team offers a full, end-to-end lifecycle solution. We also continuously enhance Lx Contracts’ software based on feedback and market trends – and we can also go over some of these capabilities during this “What’s Next” meeting.
Phase 9: Transition and support
This is a presentation lead by the Support team to explain how you will interact with support and get assistance going forward. An effective Lucernex implementation requires ongoing training and customer support, particularly as new features are unveiled or as your company scales and requires new functionality. To meet these needs, Accruent offers:
- A proven certification training curriculum
- Free superclass training, called Accruent Forward
- A robust user network
- An annual user conference called Accruent Insights
- A multilingual and multicurrency global support team
You will be introduced to all these capabilities during this final phase. The team will also introduce Salesforce and how to use the tool for customer help.
Want to see it in action? Schedule an Lx Contracts demo with one of our experts today.
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