Nakisa Lease Administration

SAP-Integrated Lease Administration and accounting

Pluspunten:

We were looking with a fully integrated Cloud solution into our SAP landscape, capable to handle our lease process globally to comply with IFRS16 regulations.

Minpunten:

At the beginning in 2018 we were still seeing some product gaps which were closed with several upgrade packages in the meantime.

Nakisa Lease Administration

Opmerkingen: This is a niche "best of breed" product and small company that is really dedicated to lease accounting. This means a lot of interaction between the user community and Nakisa. When you have a problem or an idea, you can get in touch with the solution engineers, the product team and so on. There is a process for submitting enhancements and improvements. Either through the ordinary tickets if you mark them enhancement request, or you can have a 1:1 with the solution engineer to describe your problem or improvement idea more thoroughly and then they'll take it to product team. I've personally had these tickets and these sessions, and seen some of of my ideas enter into the product at a later stage, through a new release. Other customers are doing the same. There is also a monthly user group meeting where interesting topics are discussed, and we share experiences and ideas. Nakisa will listen in and capture improvements, problems, and so on. So this kind of "virtual village" is really a strength of this product.

Pluspunten:

The twice yearly releases with ever more functionality and improvements in the Saas (cloud) version. product has now matured for many years with a high speed of innovation, so I would say the features is definitely on the "Pro" side. The fact that Nakisa hosts it means that support personnel, or the product team in tricky cases, can get a first hand view of the problem and can easily check logs, and so on. Try out solutions in QA. I am not sure if I can comment on ease of use since I have used it for many years now. For key user/administrator: Ease of administration for the master data and batch jobs, and a wealth of mass update tools and reports.

Minpunten:

It has been, let's say, quite a journey to upgrade between the different on-prem versions and then into the cloud. This meant that some contracts from the go-live had issues later on. It turned out e.g. that something was missed in migrations, due to things like additions in the data model through the early on-prem versions. The most impact was in SP4 created contracts (from initial load in 2019) when entering the Cloud. This is not a "Con" for someone choosing the software today, since they'll be starting on the cloud version and these issues won't be there. If you have SAP ECC with classic (old) Asset Accounting there can also be some issues between the two systems. You'll have to consult your SAP AA expert to set up depreciation keys and so on to fit lease accounting correctly, since the case is often that Nakisa has the correct value in the schedules, but SAP Old AA won't quite be able to match it. Also with old SAP AA you'll (at least in the current release we're on, 2021 R2) miss out on the feature intercompany lease transfer for the companies connected to SAP ECC. These limitations will go away with time as companies move to SAP S/4.

SLAN SP5

Opmerkingen: The software is still work-in-progress. After IFRS16 has been in place, there were some hiccups with the software that were both due to the system being new and some standard functionalities having bugs which has taken time to solve from both Finance and IT functions. Overall however, the system suits the needs of our company, as the primary purpose of the software is to fulfil the requirements set by the IFRS16 standard change. Leases in all are not considered to be in the center of our business, so the main aim of implementing the software was to satisfy reporting requirements towards investors.

Pluspunten:

-The software has an easy-to-use interface that new users have quickly grasped. -As the database is open, we have been able to easily utilize it to create custom reports with tools such as Lavastorm and Microsoft Power BI. -Having a data repository that contains all leasing contracts within one software has provided visibility to the needed internal stakeholders -Having a system directly linked to SAP has proven beneficial

Minpunten:

We are using the SP5 version of the software, which has then been upgraded to SP7. The reporting functionalities of the version used by our company do not support our reporting requirements. This has lead to limited visibility on the leasing contracts deployed in SLAN (for which Power BI-solutions have been created). In addition, we have found many bugs related to the version, which has caused many issues that have proven time-consuming to solve for our SLAN key users and IT.

Sanimax's experience with Nakisa Lease Administration

Opmerkingen: Nakisa Lease Administration (NLA) software has been an invaluable tool, helping us to properly control all our leases, and meet all our accounting and reporting requirements. When ASC 842 Lease Accounting Standard for US GAAP was adopted in 2020, we were able to input into NLA all our lease contracts information in an easy and efficient manner. This was no small feat considering we have hundreds of lease contracts, ranging from small value items such as photocopiers to big ticket items like trucks and railcars. The software continues to be user friendly, as we work with it monthly to manage new and matured leases and process the monthly lease accounting entries. NLA schedules and reports provide us the necessary information by contract to control the asset values and liabilities at any given time. The NLA team has also been instrumental in ensuring all our doubts and questions are answered, always quick to respond to our needs. All in all we are very satisfied with NLA and recommend it highly!

Pluspunten:

- input into NLA all our lease contracts information in an easy and efficient manner. - the software is user friendly to manage new and matured leases and process the monthly lease accounting entries. - schedules and reports provide the necessary information by contract to control the asset values and liabilities at any given time.

Minpunten:

There have been a couple of version upgrades in the last couple of years, requiring testing on our end after the upgrades.

Good solution, yet some requirements not fully included

Pluspunten:

Easy to understand, quite intuitive UI. Fits to process and organizational design.

Minpunten:

A couple of custom configurable options cannot be configured by ourselves as they are not part of the admin backend, but of the service configuration editor, where changes are only allowed with the support from the suppliers technical consultants.