Toward the end of 2020, we published a Lease Accounting Holiday Wish List for organizations that still need to adopt ASC 842, IFRS 16, and GASB 87. This is the seventh and eighth in a series of articles to provide detail for each of those wish list items.
7 & 8: Dedicated Internal Resources & Internal System Expertise
Throughout these Best Practice articles, you can find some similarities and themes. With any project Budget and Time are two huge factors. One of the best ways to set yourself up for success on your Lease Accounting Project is to make certain you have dedicated internal resources. Whether working with software providers, outsourced consulting firms, auditors, or outsourced abstraction partners, your team will need to be there to answer questions and resolve issues. Not having dedicated members assigned to the project will certainly result in delays, which results in a more expensive project.
Depending on the size of your portfolio and the anticipation of workload, we have seen dedicated internal resources comprised of one individual all the way to 20+ team members. There is no right answer as to how many team members you should have. All we can say is, make certain you have enough members to handle the workload in order to avoid delays.
Lastly, it’s critical one of your Dedicated Internal Resources is deemed the Internal System Expert. It’s equally important to have this member of the team weigh in during design sessions as it is to have this member there to help during the transition period and post Go-Live. In our experiences, all of our clients have chosen a system with the intention of it lasting. In order for your system to last, people must use it. User adoption is difficult if users feel they don’t have someone to go to in order to ask questions to gain an understanding of its functionality and how to use it. This is where your Internal System Expert is heavily utilized and trusted.
Make certain you have Dedicated Internal Resources and assign at least one of them to become the Internal System Expert.