Integrating Portfolio and Configuration Data

The lifecycle of any lease contract (also called “deal”, “schedule” or “agreement”) consists of three phases:

1. Initiate a lease schedule including its assets (equipment or real estate) and all relevant information, terms and conditions, accounting information, variables, and accounting standards.

2. Update schedule information with modifications that occur throughout the lifetime of the lease agreement which may include renewal or re-negotiation on the leased assets such as termination, additions, buy-out, return.

3. Termination of the lease agreement, according to the End-of-Term (EOT), which may imply some assets will be bought or going into evergreen.

Some information in a lease agreement in Lease Accounting Manager is linked to “configuration” data maintained in master files. There are three categories of information that must be synchronized with Lease Accounting Manager:

Portfolio data: Representing individual lease schedules and all related information, including:

• Schedule
• Details
• EOT options
• Notifications
• Interim rent
• Step payments
• Payment adjustments
• Schedule-related expenses
• Invoice-related expenses
• Paid-related expenses
• Category Lease Rate Factor (LRF)

Configuration data: Representing master data that will be linked to and commonly used by lease schedules, including:

• Companies
• Addresses
• People
• FX rates
• Ledger segment values such as account or cost center

Note: Information about integrating configuration data is discussed in the Enterprise Integration Guide.

Accounting configuration data: Representing various rules and values needed to calculate lease accounting per the proper accounting standard. Accounting configuration is not discussed in this guide as it is not subject to integration and must be defined from within Lease Accounting Manager.

Download a PDF version of the Portfolio Integration User Guide.

Integration Methods

Lease Accounting Manager offers API and file-based integrations, both of which mitigate security risks.

APIs

For Inbound and outbound integration, Lease Accounting Manager offers a full library of well-documented and secured RESTful APIs to interface with ERPs, real estate administration systems, fixed asset systems, and any other system that can call RESTful APIs and process XML.

Lease Accounting Manager Restful APIs can be used for:

• Enterprise integrations - see Enterprise Integration guide for more details.  Further information regarding enterprise API’s can be found in the API Developer’s guide.

  Synchronizing reference data such as lessee, project, property tax authority, address, business unit, entity, funder, geo, company, and contact information

  Generating ledger exports and asset-level detail reports

  Generating due payments to ERP accounts payable and importing actual disbursements

  Importing currency exchange rates

• Portfolio integrations – Portfolio use cases are discussed in detail in this guide.  Further information regarding portfolio API’s can be found in the API Developer’s guide.

  Importing leased assets and deals as well as data for subledger entries such as disbursements and payment adjustments

  Making edits to leased assets

  Making modifications to leases

  Recording events or intentions for future events such as lease terminations, renewals, and buyouts

  Searching for leased assets, contacts, and schedules

• SSO – see Single Sign-On Integration guide for more information.  Further information regarding SSO API’s can be found in the API Developer’s Guide.

  Provisioning user privileges

  Revoking user privileges

File-based

In addition to APIs, Lease Accounting Manager supports simple file transfer and file exchange.

Lease Accounting Manager includes support for importing data from standard spreadsheet-based templates and can generate reports in XML, CSV or XLSX (Microsoft Excel) formats. The Reporting Engine supports automatic transfer of generated reports via SFTP (secure file transfer protocol), allowing reporting to be leveraged as a data export mechanism.

For exports (outbound), Lease Accounting Manager users can export files manually at any time or can schedule files to be automatically generated and transferred to a designated folder on a client-provided SFTP server (and/or e-mail) at specific frequency (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.). Those files can then be processed in an automated manner on the client’s ERP system.

For imports (inbound), the client’s IT team extracts files at a specific time in a specific format and posts them to a specified folder on the client-provided SFTP server. Lease Accounting Manager can be configured to monitor the folder. Once files with a specific, agreed upon name are placed in this folder, Lease Accounting Manager processes the file by validating and importing the data into Lease Accounting Manager then sending a notice of failure or success via email.  The processing can also be monitored using the System Operations Console in the LeaseAccelerator user interface (UI).

Integration Approaches

Point-to-point integration

Lease Accounting Manager supports point to point or “direct” integration through its RESTful APIs and file-based methods.

In all cases, there are three possibilities:

1. Data valid and complete.

2. Invalid data received will trigger rejection.

3. Data valid but missing information (gaps). In this case, Lease Accounting Manager will generate the control file with missing data. This file can be fed with missing data and reloaded directly.

Direct integration using APIs

In this use case, the user will extract data from the source system, prepare the workload as per the API XML format and call Lease Accounting Manager API though the Middleware. The user must send complete and correct data as Lease Accounting Manager will respond with success or failure response. 

When calling Lease Accounting Manager API, the user can decide what Lease Accounting Manager should do for warnings and errors.  Please refer to Lease Accounting Manager API.

File-based integration using SFTP

The real estate user will collect data from the source system into the Lease Accounting Manager- supplied template (could be XLSX, or XML) and then place the file into the agreed upon server in the SFTP.

Lease Accounting Manager will detect and process the file. If the data is complete and validated, Lease Accounting Manager will update its database and generate a “Control file” carrying;

• the data imported and

• a list of the Lease Accounting Manager IDs

Lease Accounting Manager will pass the control file to the accounting user who should update the real estate system with the new Lease Accounting Manager- generated IDs. 

If the data is found to be incomplete, Lease Accounting Manager will generate the control file highlighting missing data (gaps) but no IDs shall be generated.

Lease Accounting Manager will pass the control file to the accounting user who should input the missing data and send the file back to Lease Accounting Manager by either:

• Email callback

  
  

  Upload through bulk import feature

Which Data to Send

In some use cases, the data sent to Lease Accounting Manager as payload (via API or SFTP) must only include the changes (delta). Upon successful processing of the data, Lease Accounting Manager will return a set of success IDs so that the source data can be tagged to prevent resending the same data twice.

Depending on the use case, sending a full dump of data or resending previously processed data may cause errors or maybe ignored by Lease Accounting Manager. Resending previously processed data – even if does not generate errors - may trigger the accounting engine to re-run the calculations unnecessarily – even if the incoming data exactly matches the existing  data which will negatively affect system performance and wait time for reports to be updated.