Prepare Footnote Lease For Free

Operating Lease Accounting can be done by considering that the lessor owns the property and the lessee only uses it for a fixed time. The lessee records rental payments as expenses in the books of accounts. In contrast, the lessor records the property as an asset and depreciates it over its useful life.

Typically, assets rented under operating leases include real estate, aircraft, and equipment with long, useful life spans?such as vehicles, office equipment, or industry-specific machinery. Essentially, an operating lease is a contract for a company to use an asset and return it in a similar condition to the lessor.

The new lease standard increases the scope and complexity of the financial statement footnote disclosure with additional requirements for both quantitative and qualitative disclosures. While providing useful information, using a spreadsheet to create these disclosures becomes far more difficult than before.

A straightforward example is a lease for office space in a high-rise building with multiple occupants. Since this is more like a rental than a sale, the lessor retains the building and related accounts, like a depreciation account, on its balance sheet.

Leases are recorded as liabilities on the balance sheet and as operating expenses on the income statement. Historically, for operating leases under ASC 840, the leased asset is not recorded on the lessee's balance sheet.

Initial recordation. Calculate the present value of all lease payments; this will be the recorded cost of the asset. Record the amount as a debit to the appropriate fixed asset account, and a credit to the capital lease liability account.

The formula is quite simple ? you just multiply the annual lease payment by the present value factor, and that results in the net present value of future minimum lease payments, which is recorded on the balance sheet as the lease liability (and ROU asset).