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The Leases module manages leases and recurring commitments in one place. A lease is treated as a general obligation: a counterparty, a term, a payment schedule that can escalate over time, and a set of critical dates — break options, rent reviews, renewals — each with its own notice period. The module handles both directions:
  • Leases you hold (you are the lessee) — you pay rent. Rent becomes a vendor bill you settle through Payment Runs.
  • Leases you grant (you are the lessor) — you own an asset and lease it out. Rent becomes a customer invoice your tenant pays.

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What Leases owns

  • Leases — the master obligation record: counterparty, term, currency, status, and accounting treatment
  • Schedules — the rent lines that drive billing, with escalation rules (fixed percentage, stepped, or index-linked)
  • Options — break, renewal, extension, rent review, and expiry dates with notice deadlines
  • Index series — published index values (CPI, HICP, VPI) that index-linked rent reviews calculate from
  • Granted leases — the assets you lease out, their classification, and their income schedules

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Data flows into Leases from

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Data flows out of Leases to

Contracts holds the paper, Leases holds the money. Link a lease to its contract so the legal document and the financial schedule stay together, but configure the rent schedule and the accounting here.

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The tabs

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Common tasks

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Create a lease you hold

1

Open Leases → New lease

2

Name the lease and pick the landlord

The landlord list is your suppliers list, because rent has to be paid to a party with bank details. You can create a new supplier inline without leaving the module.
3

Set the term

Enter the commencement and expiry dates. The term in months is derived from them.
4

Choose the accounting treatment

Under Lease accounting, pick one of: Off-balance (operating / HGB), IFRS 16 (ROU + liability), ASC 842 finance lease, ASC 842 operating lease, or Local GAAP. Softbooq suggests a treatment from your tenant’s accounting standard, the term, and the value — you can override it.
5

Enter the discount rate

Required for any on-balance treatment. This is the rate implicit in the lease, or your incremental borrowing rate if that is not readily determinable. It drives the present value of the liability.
6

Save, then add the rent schedule

Open the lease and add rent lines on its detail view: component (base rent, service charge, insurance, and so on), amount, and frequency. Rent does not bill until a schedule line exists.

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Add an escalation to a rent line

1

Open the lease → the rent line → Escalation

2

Choose the escalation kind

Fixed percent raises rent by a set percentage each period. Stepped applies explicit amounts from explicit dates. Index links the rent to a published index series.
3

For an index-linked escalation, pick the series

Choose a series you have set up on the Indices tab. Rent is recalculated from the published value rather than typed in by hand.
4

Save

Future rent reflects the escalation immediately — the rent roll shows the current escalated figure, not the original one.

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Set up an index series

1

Open Leases → Indices → New index series

2

Enter the series details

Give it a code (e.g. HICP), a name, the source (e.g. Eurostat), and the base year (e.g. 2020=100).
3

Enter published values

Select the series and add each published period and value as it is released. This is the data your index-linked rent reviews calculate from.
4

Record a rebasing if the statistical office rebases the index

Enter the rebase period and the link factor so historical comparisons stay correct across the rebase.
5

Refresh referencing leases

After adding a new value, use the refresh action to queue rent reviews on every lease linked to that series. Leases already up to date are left alone.

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Import leases in bulk

1

Open Leases → Import

2

Download the template

Use the supplied template so the column headers match. Common header variations are recognised automatically, so an export from another system usually maps without renaming.
3

Upload your CSV or Excel file

Review the parsed preview and correct anything flagged before committing.
4

Import

Leases are created with their schedules. Check the rent schedule on a sample before relying on the billing.

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Exercise a break, renewal, or extension option

1

Open the lease → Options → click the option

2

Enter the effective date

Required for break, renewal, and extension options. This is the date the term actually changes.
3

Confirm

A break sets the lease to terminated at that date and disposes the right-of-use asset. A renewal or extension moves the expiry date out and keeps the lease active.
4

Review the remeasurement

For an on-balance lease, changing the term is a modification: the liability is remeasured from the revised payments and the difference is posted to the ROU asset. The posted amount is confirmed on screen.

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Lease an owned asset out

1

Open Leases → Leases out → Lease out an asset

2

Name the lease and pick the tenant

The tenant list is your customers list, because rent has to be invoiced to someone. A granted lease with no customer linked cannot be billed.
3

Pick the owned asset

Search your asset register. The asset’s book value is used in the classification test.
4

Enter the term, rent, and frequency

5

Add the discount rate and the asset's economic life

Both feed the classification test: the discount rate gives the present value of the receipts, the economic life gives the term-to-life ratio.
6

Add the unguaranteed residual and any initial direct costs (optional)

For a finance lease these form part of the net investment alongside the rent. The unguaranteed residual is what the asset is still worth to you at the end of the term without a guarantee from the tenant — leave it blank for property, set it for vehicles, plant and equipment that come back with real value. Initial direct costs are the incremental costs of arranging the lease, such as agent commission. Omitting them understates both the net investment and the finance income earned across the term.
7

Flag ownership transfer or a purchase option if either applies

8

Save

Softbooq classifies the lease as operating or finance and saves it as a draft.

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Activate a granted lease

1

Open Leases out → the lease → Commence (finance) or Activate (operating)

2

For a finance lease, review what posts

The asset is derecognised at its carrying amount and replaced by a net investment in the lease. Any difference is a selling profit or loss. The asset is marked Disposed so it stops depreciating.
3

For an operating lease, nothing posts at commencement

The asset stays on your balance sheet and keeps depreciating. Income is recognised period by period instead.
4

Confirm the lease shows as Active

Only active granted leases are picked up for income recognition and invoicing.

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Bill your tenants

1

Open Leases out → Recognise due income

2

Review what it does

For every active granted lease it raises a customer invoice for each rent period that has fallen due, using your normal invoice numbering, the VAT code on the rent line, and the customer’s billing details. It then posts the period’s accounting — for a finance lease, the finance income element on top of the invoice.
3

Check the counts

The number of invoices raised is confirmed on screen. Any lease with no customer linked is listed by name so you can fix it.
4

Run it as often as you like

Both the invoicing and the recognition are idempotent — repeat runs only ever bill newly due periods.

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Edit or terminate a granted lease

1

Open Leases out → the row menu

2

Editing a draft

A draft is fully editable. Changing the term, rent, or asset re-runs the classification.
3

Editing an active lease

An active lease has posted journal entries keyed to its terms, so only its name and billing customer can be changed. The financial fields are locked.
4

Terminating

Terminate ends an active lease. Income recognition and invoicing stop from that date. For a finance lease, the remaining net investment is derecognised and the asset comes back on to your balance sheet, where it resumes depreciating.

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Accounting treatments

Two separate settings decide how a lease is accounted for, both in Settings → Accounting:
  • Your accounting standard decides the rules — whether a lease goes on the balance sheet at all.
  • Your chart of accounts decides the account codes those entries land in.
They are independent. A French business uses the PCG chart with IFRS for SMEs recognition, so rental income posts to 706 rather than 4300 while the recognition logic is the same.

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What each standard does with a lease you hold

Short-term leases stay off balance sheet under every framework. Low-value leases are an IFRS 16 election.

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What each standard does with a lease you grant

Lessor classification is the same under IFRS and US GAAP — the risks-and-rewards test decides finance vs operating, and short-term/low-value elections do not apply to a lessor. The one framework difference is straight-lining. Under IFRS, IFRS for SMEs and US GAAP, an operating lessor must spread rent evenly across the term, so a stepped or rent-free lease posts an accrued/deferred rent adjustment on top of the invoice. Under HGB, rent is recognised as it falls due and no adjustment is posted.
Softbooq only suggests a treatment from your standard and the lease terms. The Lease accounting dropdown on every lease lets you override it, so a jurisdiction or a lease that needs different handling is never forced.

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If you do not need lease accounting at all

Choose Off-balance and no journal entry is ever posted. The module still works as a lease register: schedules, escalations, index-linked reviews, critical dates and reminders all run, and rent still becomes a vendor bill or a customer invoice. Only the recognition engine sits out.

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Troubleshooting

Check the lease has a rent schedule line. A lease with a term but no schedule has nothing to bill. On a granted lease, also check a customer is linked — unlinked leases are reported by name when you run Recognise due income.
Income is only recognised for periods that have already fallen due, on leases whose status is Active. A draft granted lease is skipped entirely — commence or activate it first.
Once a granted lease is active it has posted journal entries keyed to its terms, so rewriting them from the UI would put the ledger out of step. Only the name and billing customer stay editable. To end the lease, use Terminate rather than editing it.
Active leases cannot be deleted because they have posted entries that would be orphaned. Terminate the lease instead — that keeps the accounting history intact. Drafts can be deleted freely.
The rent roll shows the current escalated rent, annualised. If the lease has a fixed-percent, stepped, or index-linked escalation, the figure reflects escalations applied to date, not the original rent.
Entering a value does not retrospectively change leases on its own. Use the refresh action on the Indices tab to queue rent reviews on every lease referencing that series.
The roll-forward on the Portfolio tab is derived from the lease schedules and is self-consistent by construction, but it is not reconciled to the GL. It is marked Preview for that reason — tie it to your ROU account before using it for statutory filing.
A finance lease derecognises the underlying asset at commencement, so it is marked Disposed and stops depreciating. That is the correct treatment — the value now sits in the net investment in the lease. Terminating the lease reinstates the asset.

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FAQ

Yes. A landlord is a party you pay, so the dropdown is your supplier list and a landlord created here is a normal supplier with bank details. On a granted lease it is the opposite — the tenant list is your customers, because you invoice them.
Yes. A granted lease points at any record in your asset register — vehicles, machinery, equipment, IT hardware. Nothing about the module is specific to real estate.
Softbooq classifies it from the risks-and-rewards test: ownership transfer, a purchase option reasonably certain to be exercised, the term against the asset’s economic life, and the present value of the receipts against fair value. Fill in the discount rate and economic life to get a meaningful answer — without them the test has less to work with.
No. Monthly recognition runs on a schedule for leases you hold. The Recognise due income action on Leases out exists so you can bill on demand rather than waiting, and because it is idempotent you can use it freely.
A lease can have multiple schedule lines — base rent, service charge, insurance, property tax, parking, and so on — each with its own frequency and escalation. A lease is attributed to a single site.
Billing stops from the termination date. For a lease you hold that ends via a break option, the ROU asset is disposed. For a granted finance lease, the remaining net investment is derecognised and the asset returns to your balance sheet.
Yes. The Portfolio tab gives the undiscounted maturity analysis bucketed within one year, one to five years, and beyond five years, plus the IFRS 16.53 weighted-average discount rate and remaining term. The Leases out tab shows the equivalent receivable maturity for leases you grant.

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See also

Contracts

Link a lease to its signed agreement so the paper and the schedule stay together.

Finance

Lease recognition, rent bills, and rent invoices all post through the general ledger.

Assets

The asset register supplies what you lease out, and receives assets back on termination.

Procurement

Rent on a lease you hold becomes a vendor bill and settles through Payment Runs.

Sales

Rent on a lease you grant becomes a customer invoice and settles through receivables.

Reports

Lease cost and income flow into budget-vs-actual and dimensional P&L.