How Cushman & Wakefield brought 12,000 leases under control across 60 countries

When your lease portfolio spans 12,000 properties across 60 countries and 23 currencies, there is no room for approximation. At Cushman & Wakefield, the lease accounting function had grown organically over a decade, layering spreadsheets on top of spreadsheets until the entire process depended on a handful of people who knew where to find things.

Sarah Chen took over as VP of Lease Accounting in early 2023 and immediately recognized the scope of the problem. "We had 14 people touching lease data in some form," she says. "Regional teams in London, Singapore, and Sydney each had their own trackers. None of them were working from the same source of truth."

When the spreadsheets broke

The 2023 year-end audit exposed exactly how fragile the system was. External auditors flagged 340 lease modifications that had never been properly reflected in the journal entries. The consolidated workbook that the team relied on for reporting had grown so large that it crashed when anyone tried to add new data. Formulas were breaking. Filters were returning wrong results. Links between sheets were corrupted.

"The reports would fall apart when too much data was added," Chen recalls. "We were patching things weekly, and the patches created new problems."

The reconciliation effort took six weeks. Two senior accountants resigned within a month of each other, citing burnout from the repetitive manual work. Chen knew the process, not the people, was the problem.

The auditors estimated their additional work on the lease reconciliation at nearly $800,000 above the original engagement fee. That number got the executive team's attention.

Finding a platform that matched the portfolio

Chen's team evaluated five lease accounting platforms over three months. The requirements were specific: multi-entity consolidation across dozens of legal entities, multi-currency support for 23 currencies, and document intelligence that could parse thousands of existing lease PDFs without requiring the team to re-key every contract.

Most vendors could handle the calculation engine. But when Chen tested them against real scenarios - a lease modification in Singapore that required IFRS 16 treatment while the same property needed ASC 842 entries for the US parent - the field narrowed quickly.

Arvexi stood out because the Document Intelligence module could ingest the existing lease library directly. "We uploaded 4,000 documents in the first batch," Chen says. "By morning, Arvexi had parsed 3,800 of them with confidence scores between 90 and 95 percent. That changed the entire migration timeline."

The implementation took 90 days from contract to go-live. Arvexi's onboarding team mapped the entity structure, configured the multi-currency engine, and built custom journal entry templates that aligned with the company's existing ERP workflows. Regional teams in London, Singapore, and Sydney came online in parallel, eliminating the timezone-driven bottleneck that had previously delayed consolidation by two to three days each period.

What changed on the ground

The shift was felt immediately. Instead of chasing lease amendments through email chains and shared drives, the accounting team now receives automated alerts when a modification is detected. The review queue surfaces discrepancies before they compound. Every journal entry traces back to a source document.

"The first monthly close after go-live took four days," Chen says. "By month three, we were under three and a half. Our auditors noticed before we even told them."

The Intelligence module became particularly valuable for portfolio-level analysis. Chen's team uses it to run scenario models on lease restructuring, assess the balance sheet impact of early terminations, and generate compliance reports for ASC 842, IFRS 16, and GASB 87 simultaneously. Questions that previously took a week to research now return answers in under a minute.

The numbers that followed

In the first year, the monthly close cycle dropped from 12 days to 3.5. Audit preparation costs fell from $1.2 million annually to $380,000, driven almost entirely by eliminating manual reconciliation work. The team recovered $85,000 in overpayments that had gone undetected in the old spreadsheet system.

But Chen points to a quieter metric as the one she values most: team retention. "Nobody has left the lease accounting group in 14 months," she says. "When you take away the soul-crushing manual work and let people do real accounting, they stay."

The portfolio under management has since expanded to include equipment leases and ground leases that were previously tracked in separate systems, bringing the total past 14,500 agreements.

"After I open my email in the morning, I open Arvexi," Chen says. "That is one of the first things I get into on a daily basis. We are not just compliant anymore. We actually have visibility into what our lease portfolio costs, where the risks are, and what is coming up next. That is a first for this company."