Supporting the lease accounting audit

What auditors need from lease accounting

Lease accounting under IFRS 16 and FRS 102 involves significant judgements — particularly around discount rates, lease term determination, and option assessment. Auditors need to see not just the numbers, but the reasoning behind them and the calculation methodology that produced them.

AuditLease is built around this requirement. Every calculation is documented, every judgement is recorded, and every output is traceable back to its inputs.

The evidence pack

Every AuditLease calculation produces a complete evidence pack containing:

• Lease data: commencement date, lease term, payment schedule, escalation terms, and key options
• Accounting judgements: documented reasoning for IBR selection, lease term determination, and exemption decisions
• Calculation run detail: present value calculations, amortisation schedules for both the ROU asset and lease liability
• Journal entries: initial recognition and subsequent entries mapped to the chart of accounts
• Statutory note: the draft disclosure for inclusion in the financial statements, including movement tables and maturity analysis

Immutable calculation history

Once a calculation run is completed and used to generate journals, it cannot be edited or deleted. If a lease is remeasured or modified, a new calculation run is created, and the full history of all previous runs is preserved.

This means auditors can see exactly what calculation underpins each balance, and can verify that journals match the calculation outputs.

Documented accounting judgements

AuditLease requires users to document key accounting judgements before a lease calculation can be finalised. This includes:

• The basis for the discount rate selected, including how the IBR was determined
• The lease term determination, including whether optional periods have been included and why
• Whether any short-term or low-value exemptions have been applied, and the reasoning
• Any renewal, purchase, or termination option assessments

These judgements are stored against the lease record and are included in the evidence pack export.

Read-only access for auditors

Clients can grant read-only access to their auditors. Auditors can view all lease data, calculation runs, judgement records, and evidence pack outputs without being able to modify anything.

Read-only access is available at the entity level — so if a client has multiple entities, access can be restricted to only the entities relevant to the engagement.