Kennett Square-based Genesis HealthCare, one of the nation’s largest post-acute care providers, found the process of complying with the new lease-accounting standard more challenging than originally expected, writes Mark Maurer for The Wall Street Journal.

In the last year, the Financial Accounting Standards Board started requiring public companies to report operating leases on their balance sheets to increase transparency for investors and lenders. However, this turned out to be more complicated than it sounded for many companies.

Genesis had to find hundreds of small equipment leases. Finance chief Tom DiVittorio said he anticipated searching for leases for medical equipment, copy/fax machines, etc. But there were also less-obvious items that needed to be located, such as the lease embedded in a service agreement.

“Even people in our nursing facilities who need to be focused on patient care had to help us dig up leases,” said DiVittorio.

He said that his biggest regret was spending too much time searching for a software tool that would accommodate all of Genesis’s leases. He was not able to find one.

He advised future companies adapting to the standard to “learn in Excel what you really need out of software and go find it.”

Read more in The Wall Street Journal here.

[uam_ad id=”80503″]

.

[uam_ad id=”80502″]