Style Footnote Lease For Free

Common types of non-current liabilities reported in a company's financial statements include long-term debt (e.g., bonds payable, long-term notes payable), leases, pension liabilities, and deferred tax liabilities.

Lease agreements where the lessor maintains ownership are operating leases. For operating leases, the lessor continues depreciating the leased asset and records the incoming lease receipts as revenue on a straight-line basis over the lease term.

The accounting entry is to debit Lease Receivable and credit Property, plant and equipment (sometimes directly cash). If lessor incurs any direct and incremental costs in negotiating leases, those must be recognized over the lease term and not to the expenses when incurred.

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.

Under ASC 842, a lessor excludes from the consideration in the contract, and therefore from lease payments, most variable payments related to the use of the asset (such as the volume of electricity generated by a solar farm).

A lease is classified as a finance lease by a lessee and as a sales-type lease by a lessor if ownership of the underlying asset transfers to the lessee by the end of the lease term. This criterion is also met if the lessee is required to pay a nominal fee for the legal transfer of ownership.

The lessor reports the lease as a leased asset on the balance sheet and individual lease payments as income on the income and cash flow statements. The lessee reports the lease as both an asset and a liability on the balance sheet due to their stake as a potential owner of the asset and their required payment.

Finance lease and operating lease liabilities should be presented separately from each other and from other liabilities on the balance sheet or disclosed in the notes to the financial statements along with the balance sheet line items in which those liabilities are included.