Major manufacturing company speeds up lease accounting and FASB compliance

Olympic Steel is a publicly held manufacturing company that manages multiple lease types, including equipment and real estate. Based outside of Cleveland, Ohio, the company’s 2022 annual revenue was $2.55 billion.

Business Challenge

Lease administration is a big job, and the accounting team handles it all in-house. That means using spreadsheets to manually sort through over 300 leases to ensure disclosures meet U.S. GAAP standards.

The process became more painful and tedious in 2019 when the FASB ASC 842 compliance requirements came into effect. Olympic Steel needed software, and it had a wishlist. First, it needed to adequately generate disclosures without a lot of team involvement. Next, monthly journal entries needed to be automatically generated. And finally, U.S. GAAP compliance was a must.

Solution

Olympic Steel implemented MRI’s leasing tools to drive a much smoother lease accounting process for the team and reduce data entry nightmares.

I can’t quantify the enormous amount of time and heartache using MRI Software has saved me. The biggest benefit is taking all of the manual labor out of the process so we can focus on other growth initiatives for the business.

– Kevin Eldridge, Corporate Accounting Manager

Result

The team at Olympic Steel can spend less time on lease accounting and more time on strategic initiatives.

Significant savings
Olympic Steel saved an estimated $4,000 per year and more than 150 hours of staff time by adopting new lease accounting tools.

Efficient processes
MRI’s lease accounting solution streamlines the process of adding new leases, making it simple and fast. Running disclosure reports is much more intuitive, and spreadsheets are now a thing of the past.

Confident compliance
The ability to automate data entry and improve data accuracy allows the company to breathe easier knowing that its systems support compliance with FASB and U.S. GAAP.