Finance Monthly CEO Awards 2018 Edition

FINANCE MONTHLY CEO AWARDS 2018 www.finance-monthly.com 41 UNITED KINGDOM AREAS OF EXPERTISE Michael is an expert in the new lease accounting standards - ASC 842 for US GAAP and IFRS 16 for international companies. An outcome of the Enron and WorldCom accounting scandals of the early 2000s, the new standards aim to offer investors greater transparency by requiring most leases be carried on corporate balance sheets as assets and liabilities. Michael has followed the evolution of these new standards closely from the original SEC and Congressional mandates through the various exposure drafts published by accounting standards boards. While there are hundreds of CPAs who understand the technical accounting aspects of these new rules, Michael is an expert in the practical implementation of the standards including the organizational, process, and systems changes required for compliance. Examples include: • Lease versus Buy Analysis - How to optimize capital budgets with a thorough comparison of the cash flows, tax considerations, and balance sheet impacts of leasing assets such as trucks, computers, and forklifts. • Procure-to-Pay - How to standardize purchasing controls, reconcile vendor invoices, and perform spend analysis to identify opportunities for cost savings in leasing programs such as reducing month-to-month evergreen payments. • Asset Management - How to use technology to track leased assets such as company cars, pallet jacks, and rail cars throughout their lifecycle ensuring compliance with regulatory, tax, insurance, and contractual obligations. • Record-to-Report - How to ensure the accuracy of financial reporting and compliance with SOX for leases on office buildings, industrial warehouses, and corporate data centers by automating the calculation of expenses such as depreciation, amortization, and interest. FIRM PROFILE LeaseAccelerator is the first enterprise application designed specifically to automate the business processes for managing leases. The average Fortune 500 company leases between $100M and $1B in assets ranging from corporate real estate and office furniture to employee laptops and data center infrastructure. However, historically there has been no enterprise application on the market to enable companies to automate the procurement, asset management, and financial reporting activities required for leasing. With over $3 trillion in spend across the world, leasing was one of the last major business processes that had not been disrupted by technology. LeaseAccelerator’s mission is to completely transform the way Fortune 500 companies manage their leases, saving them millions of dollars and enabling compliance with new SEC accounting rules. LeaseAccelerator’s most popular application, the Enterprise LeaseAccounting solution, helps companies rapidly complywith the new lease accounting standards. With LeaseAccelerator, companies can automate the record-to-report cycle for the standards, including producing the necessary financial disclosures for the SEC and other regulators. The Enterprise Lease Management application helps companies automate business processes such as tracking movements of leased assets, renewing leases at end of term, and reporting on the economic performance of leases. It provides companies with a single system to track all of their leases across the enterprise, a necessity under the new standards. Over the past year, LeaseAccelerator has experienced explosive growth, signing over 50 new Fortune 1000 companies, including Tyson Foods, Cummins, and Dow Chemical, to leverage its cloud-based application. The company has grown in size from under 30 employees in 2015 to a workforce of over 100 with its focus on hiring a dream team of leasing experts. These specialists hail from the offices of Fortune 500 CFO organizations with pedigrees from the Big Four audit firms.