About the Customer
Eisai, Inc. is the US subsidiary of Eisai Co., Ltd, a Japanese pharmaceutical company based in Tokyo, Japan. While Eisai is a publicly-traded company on the Tokyo stock exchange, the US arm is a private entity comprising approximately 3,000 employees. While their headquarters are in Nutley, NJ, Eisai US has manufacturing sites across the US and around the world. Eisai has marketing operations in 19 European countries as well as the Asia-Pacific region.
The Challenge
The accounting team at Eisai US was spending valuable time and resources maintaining two sets of schedules – one under GAAP and one under IFRS. The manual calculation and entries, as well as working with hundreds of worksheets became quite complex and time-consuming. The Eisai US portfolio currently has around 50 leases, of which 90% are in real estate and over 700 vehicle leases.
The Process
Once identifying the need for lease accounting software, Shurr and his colleagues spent around four months considering various vendors. After a coworker read about Trullion’s AI-powered platform, Vincent booked a demo and was immediately impressed.
Right off the bat, he noted that Trullion was “very intuitive-looking, looked very clean, simple and modern; and the calculation schedules were very clear to understand as well the configuration required was not complicated.”
According to Shurr, other solutions looked “a lot more complicated to set up, and they also had a whole bunch of functionality that we didn’t really need. Trullion had what we felt was the right solution for us in terms of the look, the feel, the functionality.”
The Solution
From the start, Shurr was immediately impressed by the intuitive user experience and uncomplicated process. “It’s very quick and very intuitive and it just makes sense.”
Eisai is now using Trullion on a monthly basis to book the accounting entries, report on leases, reconcile the date of the general ledger, and report IFRS numbers to their corporate parent. On an annual basis, the client is using the disclosure features to compile the data needed for annual GAAP financial statements. “So I can just download the report and basically put the numbers into my template that I have for this. It’s very smooth. It’s very clean and easy and it really has saved a lot of time.”
Saving Time
Before using Trullion, Shurr felt that he and his team were unnecessarily wasting time on spreadsheets and calculations. “Last year, I had to figure out how to do all the year-end calculations myself, specifically the weighted average lease years and the weighted average discount rate. It took a bit of time to fine the calculations needed and then took more time to organize the data to support the calculations – essentially, it was a lot of effort. Now it’s right there. The system does it for you.”
Improving Reporting Accuracy
In addition to saving time, Trullion has also helped Eisai improve the accuracy of their numbers with minimal effort. “Trullion has saved us time and actually – but just as important – the numbers are accurate.” Eisai actually decided to make strategic changes in the way they accounted for leases according to Trullion’s calculations. Shurr explains that the system “handled leasehold improvements a little differently than our Excel models and we ultimately proved to ourselves and Deloitte that Trullion is performing an accurate ASC 842 and converted.”
Tracing the Audit Trail
All accountants and controllers can relate to the frustration of the inability to find the source of a variance or potential mistake at the end of a period. When Shurr’s team discovered a potential issue in their calculation, he explains: “I had a very easy time finding the variance because of the system. I was able to run the roll-up report and see in the given month that yes, the rent payment on aggregate changed. The change equated to our difference and from there, it was a simple matter to trace the impacted lease – the Landlord failed to adjust the rent amount in this case.״ “Prior to Trullion, we may have never identified the difference. We might just have had to write it off as a missed item difference and move on. But now because of Trullion, I was able to quickly hone in on where the difference was because of the features of the software.”
Highly Configurable Solution
After the initial onboarding and implementation of the platform, Shurr was convinced that Trullion could handle an additional challenge that no other lease accounting software could: an automated solution for over 700 vehicle leases.
Shurr explains that “the challenge was we needed a simple way to get the data into the solution and there are too many vehicles to manually update on a month to month basis. So at any given month, we could have 50 vehicles being retired and 50 new vehicles issued from a turnover point of view or from a switch out point of view and we didn’t have the resources to sit there and dedicate someone to terminating 50 leases individually, adding 50 leases individually and then getting all the approvals, etc. We needed to be able to upload the data from a static file.”
The Trullion team was up for the challenge: over the span of a few months, the team worked concurrently with Shurr to develop a streamlined solution for Eisai. According to Shurr, “Trullion partnered very proactively with us to build out a solution for our vehicle lease accounting needs. They worked with us hand in hand and accepted my feedback. They took it all in stride and really understood it and modified their system to deliver what we needed and we went through a couple of rounds of back and forth testing of course as you can imagine, to get it right. But ultimately we did and they were always there. When I had questions, they were there. When I had comments, they were there and we got it done in a very short period of time.”
Conclusion
In addition to reducing risk and accommodating the vehicle leases, Shurr mentions the greatest benefit Trullion has provided is “the peace of mind. I just know that I have a system that I can trust and that I don’t have to worry about and I know I’m not going to have issues in terms of accounting for my leases or finding my contracts. And I think that’s the biggest benefit…That peace of mind, knowing that we have a solution to deploy when we have a new lease, a tried and true way of accounting for it safely and making sure there are no mistakes.”
