Sim­pli­fy IFRS 16 con­ver­sion with otris soft­ware

Fran­cotyp-Postalia Holding AG is an in­ter­na­tion­ally active group based in Germany. The company sells products and ser­vices outside Germany through sub­si­di­ar­ies in the USA, Canada, Great Britain, France, the Neth­er­lands, Belgium, Italy, Sweden and Austria. The ap­plic­a­tion of the IFRS 16 stand­ard was to be im­ple­men­ted for all sub­si­di­ar­ies ac­cord­ing to a uniform system – con­trolled from the headquar­ters in Germany.

Search for suit­able soft­ware
To im­ple­ment the new leasing stand­ard IFRS 16, the company was looking for a soft­ware solu­tion con­sist­ing of a leasing tool and an up­stream con­tract man­age­ment system. The entire port­fo­lio of leasing con­tracts was to be uni­formly struc­tured in a central con­tract data­base.

Another re­quire­ment: access to this data­base re­gard­less of loc­a­tion, so that the in­di­vidu­al sub­si­di­ar­ies can use the system to store and manage the leasing con­tracts in their area of re­spons­ib­il­ity there.

There were several reasons why FP chose otris soft­ware as its con­tract man­age­ment soft­ware. Among other things, the un­com­plic­ated in­teg­ra­tion of the in­ter­na­tion­al sub­si­di­ar­ies was con­vin­cing: By means of set­tings in the rights and roles concept, otris Con­sult­ing im­ple­men­ted the spe­cific­a­tion that certain re­spons­ible em­ploy­ees in the sub­si­di­ar­ies can only use the system to submit and manage their leasing con­tracts. The central finance de­part­ment in Berlin, on the other hand, has access to all filed leasing con­tracts in order to eval­u­ate them and prepare them for ac­count­ing.

Valu­ation of leases
In order to check the leasing con­tracts for their balance sheet ef­fect­ive­ness, the soft­ware provides dif­fer­ent tools: Each lease is in a digital file. The pro­cessor marks the digital files with metadata that cat­egor­ises the leasing con­tract (e.g. term or leasing rate). In ad­di­tion, it is doc­u­mented which leasing con­tracts have already been trans­ferred to the leasing tool for further ac­count­ing pro­cessing and which con­tracts have been changed after export to the leasing tool. Old status and changes can be traced within certain limits over the entire con­tract period. For the purpose of ac­count­ing pro­cessing in the leasing tool, one or more assets are created in each leasing con­tract. Pay­ments are as­signed to these assets, which are es­sen­tial for de­term­in­ing the balance sheet values in the leasing tool.

In­ter­face to third party system
The data gen­er­ated in otris con­tract is ex­por­ted to an ac­count­ing tool (leasing tool) which gen­er­ates the booking records. The flex­ible ad­apt­ab­il­ity of the otris con­tract in­ter­face proved to be ex­tremely helpful in the project: A system change in the leasing tool re­quired an ad­apt­a­tion of the data struc­ture of the otris con­tract export file, which otris Con­sult­ing im­ple­men­ted at short notice and at a man­age­able cost.

Further ex­pan­sion
FP cur­rently uses otris con­tract almost ex­clus­ively to record, manage and eval­u­ate rental and leasing con­tracts and for the op­er­a­tion­al im­ple­ment­a­tion of IFRS 16 re­quire­ments. The project has once again made it clear that a central, web-based system also offers many ad­vant­ages for all other con­tract man­age­ment tasks. A further ex­pan­sion of the system is there­fore planned for the future and is cur­rently in the con­cep­tion phase.