Issue link: https://resources.tangoanalytics.com/i/1465882
Copyright © 2023 Tango. All rights reserved. 10 2023 Lease Buyer's Guide to Lease Administration & Accounting the size of your company and your needs. Beware if a provider has complex pricing that is hard to understand. This usually translates into hidden fees and results in underestimating TCO. This is not too dissimilar from cellular carriers who often have a base fee then nickel and dime customers for every little add-on. Look for vendors who charge a straightforward cost per lease on a monthly or annual basis. Onboarding/Implementation Fees There is a similar dynamic to onboarding or implementation of the system. Again, you're looking for simplicity and full visibility into your cost exposure. Here again we see a divergence based on the size and complexity of the company being serviced. Implementing a lease administration and lease accounting software package that will manage hundreds, if not thousands of leases, and be used by dozens of users, is a completely different animal than a mid-sized company with a few dozen or even a few hundred leases. Large enterprise-class companies should go through a detailed scoping exercise to define the engagement's statement of work that will govern implementation. Make sure to cover all your bases from system design to configuration, testing, training and go-live. When it comes to smaller companies and portfolios, look for providers who have onboarding clearly articulated with logical steps outlining what will happen, by whom and when. This is a good test for providers. If they don't have their act together for onboarding, chances are their technical support won't be much better once you are live. Regardless of the size of your company, the concept of speed-to-value is critical. What this means in non- marketing speak is, how quickly can the software be up and running so a customer can realize the value of their investment. If you license software and it takes 6 months before you can start using it, you've dug a deeper hole from the standpoint of your return on investment. Mid-sized companies should expect to be up and running quickly, measured in weeks not months. Training Fees System adoption is everything. You can have the best software solution in the world, but if no one is using it, everything is for not. People are resistant to change and anything you can do to smooth the transition from the old way of doing things to the new, the better. Training is often lumped into implementation / onboarding fees, but we're calling it out separately to emphasize its importance. Additionally, optional add- on training is sometimes available a-la-carte. Make sure to explore each vendor's educational offering and craft a training strategy that is effective for your organization. Large enterprise-class companies will likely be offered a "train-the-trainer" option, where the vendor trains a group of internal user champions, who then in turn train the rest of the users. Following this approach can save money, but make sure your company has adequate resources to execute on this training strategy. Companies often underestimate the amount of work it takes to train everyone and therefore underinvest, which leads to disastrous results and low system adoption. Upgrade Costs Software providers release new capabilities all the time. Historically, for on-premise or single tenant-