How KPMG cut client onboarding from weeks to days and doubled their advisory capacity

Most lease accounting platforms are built for a single company managing its own portfolio. KPMG needed something fundamentally different. As one of the Big Four professional services firms, their lease advisory practice does not manage one portfolio. It manages hundreds, each with its own entity structure, reporting requirements, and compliance deadlines.

David Park leads the lease advisory practice and had been watching the gap between client demand and team capacity widen for two years. "Every new ASC 842 engagement was essentially a custom project," Park says. "We were building the same infrastructure over and over for every client, and it was killing our margins."

The multi-client bottleneck

The advisory team had been using a combination of proprietary spreadsheet models and a legacy lease tool that was designed for single-tenant use. Every new client meant a fresh setup: importing lease data, configuring entity hierarchies, mapping journal entry templates to the client's chart of accounts, and building custom reports that matched the firm's deliverable standards.

For a mid-market client with 50 leases, onboarding took three to four weeks. For enterprise clients with complex portfolios, it could stretch to two months. Park's team of 30 professionals was maxed out at 80 concurrent engagements.

"We were turning away work," Park says. "Not because we lacked the expertise, but because we did not have the infrastructure to scale. Our people were spending 60 percent of their time on setup and data entry instead of actual advisory work."

The breaking point came when a major financial services client requested a multi-standard engagement covering ASC 842, IFRS 16, and GASB 87 across 12 entities. The existing tools could not handle the complexity without extensive manual workarounds that would have consumed a team of four for six weeks.

A platform built for advisory firms

Park's team evaluated several platforms, but most assumed a single-company use case. Arvexi's multi-tenant architecture and role-based access controls made it the only platform that could support the advisory model natively.

"The multi-tenant setup was the differentiator," Park says. "Each client gets an isolated environment, but our team manages everything from a single dashboard. We can see the status of every engagement, every deadline, every review queue - all in one place."

The Document Intelligence module eliminated the most time-consuming part of onboarding. Instead of manually entering lease terms from client-provided documents, Park's team uploads the source files and lets Arvexi extract the data. "A client sent us 400 PDFs on a Monday. By Wednesday, we had all 400 leases loaded with validated terms. That used to take three people two weeks."

Arvexi also configured custom reporting templates that match the firm's deliverable standards. When Park's team generates a client report, it arrives in the format that quality reviewers expect, eliminating the back-and-forth that used to add days to every engagement.

Scaling without scaling costs

The operational change was immediate and measurable. Client onboarding dropped from three to four weeks down to three to five days. The same team of 30 professionals now manages over 200 active engagements, more than double the previous capacity.

"We did not hire a single additional person," Park says. "We just stopped doing manual work that a platform should have been handling all along."

The advisory team has started offering new service lines that were not economically viable before. Lease portfolio optimization, scenario modeling for real estate rationalization, and ongoing compliance monitoring are now standard offerings. Junior staff spend less time on data entry and more time learning substantive advisory work - the kind of judgment calls that build long-term careers.

Park sees this as a competitive advantage that compounds over time. "The people we are training today are learning actual lease accounting judgment, not spreadsheet formatting. That is the kind of experience that makes them valuable to clients."

The business impact

Client work now takes roughly 60 percent less time than it did before Arvexi. Revenue per engagement has increased because faster delivery means more capacity and expanded service offerings. Client satisfaction scores hit their highest point in three years.

The pipeline of new engagements has grown because the practice can take on work it previously had to decline. Park's team recently completed an engagement for a healthcare system with 1,200 leases across 40 entities in under four weeks - a project that would have been logistically impossible with the old process.

"Arvexi did not just make us more efficient," Park says. "It changed what we are able to offer. We went from being a compliance shop to being a strategic advisor on lease portfolio management. That is a fundamentally different conversation with our clients."