Every business commitment tells a financial story, and lease agreements are an important part of it. Behind each contract are payment schedules, renewal dates, financial obligations, and accounting responsibilities that demand accuracy and attention. As lease portfolios grow, keeping every detail organized and every financial record in order can place considerable pressure on finance teams. The real challenge lies not just in managing these agreements, but in ensuring that every number is accounted for, every report is dependable, and every record is ready for an auditor’s review.
This is where iLeasePro makes a meaningful difference. Built around the practical needs of private U.S. companies and nonprofits with lease portfolios of every size, the company offers a dedicated platform that brings lease contract management and accounting together in one place. It helps businesses move beyond scattered records and manual calculations, replacing repetitive work with a more organized, accurate, and transparent approach to lease management.
Designed to support ASC 842 compliance, iLeasePro automates essential accounting tasks, including journal entries, amortization schedules, and financial disclosure reports. Its complete audit trail helps finance teams trace the figures behind their reports, while its SOC 1 Type 2 report reflects its commitment to established controls. With implementation typically completed in under a week and transparent pricing available upfront, the platform makes adopting lease accounting technology more accessible and predictable.
Recognized by CIO Bulletin as one of the “Leading Lease Intelligence & Accounting Platforms,” iLeasePro reflects a simple but important principle: lease accounting should provide clarity, not create complexity. By bringing structure, accuracy, and accountability to lease management, the company empowers finance teams to work with greater confidence and devote more attention to the financial decisions that move their businesses forward.
At CIO Bulletin, we had the distinct honor of interviewing John Meedzan, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of iLeasePro. During the conversation, he shared valuable insights into how the company empowers finance teams to move beyond time-consuming spreadsheet management and focus on making informed, confident financial decisions.
Interview Highlights
What inspired the founding of iLeasePro, and how did your journey evolve to solve the early complex engineering and software challenges of operational lease management?
Before iLease, I was CIO at a Massachusetts private equity firm that acquired more than $1 billion in commercial real estate, and I saw firsthand how poorly lease data was managed. As FASB worked toward the new lease standard that became ASC 842, it was clear the problem was about to get much bigger. Bringing operating leases onto the balance sheet meant right-of-use assets, lease liabilities, present value calculations, and amortization schedules that had to stay correct through every renewal, escalation, concession, acquisition, and modification. Most companies weren’t going to manage that reliably in Excel. So we built iLeasePro to do the math and show its work. Customers then pulled us toward lease administration; document storage and critical date notifications turned out to matter to them as much as the accounting. Early on, we also chose to serve private companies and nonprofits only, and that decision has shaped nearly every feature since. This past year, we finished the biggest modernization in the platform’s history, which opens the door to AI.
Can you brief us on your cloud-based platform and services? What key innovations, like rapid cloud deployment, make iLeasePro stand apart in the lease management market?
It’s a cloud platform for lease accounting and lease portfolio management, built for private U.S. companies and nonprofits that report under U.S. GAAP and have real estate and equipment leases. It handles the whole lifecycle: manual lease abstraction and document storage, critical date alerts, ASC 842 classification, amortization schedules, automated journal entries, and more than 50 standard reports. It also supports multiple entities and subsidiaries in one account. The biggest recent change is the subledger. iLeasePro now produces a trial balance, as well as balance sheet and income statement activity for each lease and for the whole portfolio, so a controller can confirm the lease subledger is in balance before entries reach the general ledger. Implementation is quick: our import tool loads existing leases, onboarding support is free, and most customers are live within days. You choose compliance, contract management (lease administration), or both, regardless of the size of your portfolio, and every plan includes unlimited users. Our pricing is published, which is still unusual in this market. I think a company should know what compliance will cost before it talks to a salesperson.
With iLeasePro being a leading ASC 842 lease accounting platform, how does your guided Accounting Classification Wizard empower finance teams to handle complex operating vs. finance leases?
Classification is where a lot of ASC 842 errors start, which is why we built the ASC 842 Classification Wizard. It takes users through the five tests: whether ownership transfers, whether there’s a purchase option the lessee is reasonably certain to exercise, whether the lease term covers the major part of the asset’s remaining economic life, whether the present value of payments amounts to substantially all of the asset’s fair value, and whether the asset is so specialized it has no alternative use to the lessor. Meet any one of them and it’s a finance lease. Every answer is saved with the lease, so when an auditor asks why a lease was classified a certain way, the support is already there. The system then applies the correct treatment automatically: a straight-line single lease cost for operating leases, or separate amortization and interest expense for finance leases. A staff accountant can apply the criteria consistently and document the judgment behind each decision across hundreds of leases.
What distinctive leadership philosophy and customer-first culture have enabled your team to help clients navigate strict FASB regulatory landscapes while continually outpacing market expectations?
Good support starts with knowing who’s on the other end. Most of our customers are controllers on small finance teams who never planned to become lease accounting specialists. When they reach out, they’re often in the middle of a close or getting ready for an audit, so we treat their question with the urgency they feel. We fix the issue, then walk through the accounting behind it so they can explain it to their auditor themselves. Our Knowledge Base has more than 300 articles, from audit readiness to incremental borrowing rates, and our free tools don’t require an email address. Many of our features began as support conversations, including multi-entity capabilities, multi-client management for CPA firms, and the new subledger reporting.
Today, where SOC compliance and data security are paramount, how do you build executive trust around objective automated calculations without affecting established ERP workflows?
Trust comes down to reducing two risks: inaccurate or invalid lease data, and compliance errors. iLeasePro has received SOC 1 Type 2 reports from an independent service auditor, most recently for 2026, which give our customers’ auditors third-party assurance over our controls relevant to their financial reporting. Single sign-on and multi-factor authentication through Auth0 come standard, along with role-based access controls and full audit trails. The calculation engine applies identical logic to every lease. Each schedule, journal entry, and trial balance can be traced back to the inputs that produced it, and the system enforces that debits equal credits. We also don’t ask anyone to change their accounting system. Our journal entries can be exported to any general ledger, and our Sage Intacct integration posts entries directly, so nobody has to rekey them.
How does your centralized platform deliver an operational win by enhancing tenant peace-of-mind, executive visibility, auditor confidence, and accounting team efficiency across commercial lease portfolios?
For the companies we work with, the tenant is the customer: the lessee carrying the lease obligations on its balance sheet. iLeasePro keeps every lease document, abstracted term, and critical date in one system, with automatic alerts ahead of renewals, expirations, and option deadlines. Missing a renewal option because it lived in someone’s calendar is an expensive mistake. Executives get portfolio reporting on effective rental rates, net present value, and total occupancy cost. Auditors get the documentation they ask for: classification support, amortization schedules, rollforwards, disclosure reports, and a subledger trial balance that reconciles to the general ledger. Journal entries are generated automatically. And because every plan includes unlimited users, the controller, the bookkeeper, and the outside CPA are all working from the same data.
Being recognized as a “Leading Lease Intelligence & Accounting Platform,” what operational milestones and technological breakthroughs have positioned your firm at the forefront?
We’ve grown steadily since 2012, and today iLeasePro manages more than 10,000 leases for organizations in healthcare, veterinary medicine, franchising and retail, nonprofits, fitness, and the startup world. Along the way, we added a Sage Intacct integration, received an honorable mention in Accounting Today’s Top Accounting Products in 2022, moved from SOC 1 Type 1 to Type 2 attestation, and built multi-client tools for CPA firms. The biggest milestone, though, was rebuilding iLeasePro end to end this past year. That gave us a full ASC 842 subledger, a simpler product lineup, and a modern architecture we can build AI on.
Looking ahead, what strategic updates, direct API accounting integrations, or portfolio analytics enhancements are on your immediate roadmap to advance global access to affordable compliance?
For most companies, the biggest cost in lease accounting is staff time: keying in lease data, reconciling spreadsheets, and answering auditor questions. Our roadmap uses AI and automation to cut that time while keeping a person in control. It starts with AI-powered lease abstraction, which captures a lease’s clauses and options and builds them into the lease record, so users get answers and insights instead of digging through PDFs. Next, we’re taking journal entry automation further, so entries move from generation through review and posting with far less manual effort. We’re also building anomaly detection that flags unusual items, such as a payment that doesn’t match the lease terms or a schedule that has changed unexpectedly, before they reach the general ledger or the auditor. QuickBooks Online integration is coming soon, with other leading accounting solutions planned for 2027, so lease data flows into the general ledger without rekeying.
As automated compliance and predictive data analytics reshape real estate accounting, how is iLeasePro positioned to lead this paradigm shift and adapt to evolving FASB/GASB standards?
I’m optimistic, with one condition: automation and analytics are only as good as the data underneath them. Our modernized subledger holds every lease, payment, and journal entry in clean, structured form, which AI and analytics need to produce results a person can verify. An accountant has to be able to trace any number back to its source and sign off on it, and iLeasePro is built that way. On standards, our focus remains ASC 842 for private U.S. companies and nonprofits. We follow FASB closely, and when a new Accounting Standards Update affects our customers, we update the platform so customers don’t have to work around it. The new architecture also provides the foundation for iLeasePro to extend to other standards, including IFRS 16 and GASB 87, as customers need them.
The Visionary Leader Behind iLeasePro’s Success
John Meedzan is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of iLease Management LLC, the company behind iLeasePro. He has over 40 years of experience in commercial real estate and financial services technology. Before co-founding iLease, John served as Managing Director and Chief Information Officer of a Massachusetts-based private equity firm that acquired more than $1 billion in commercial real estate. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Saint Anselm College and a master’s degree in Information Technology from the Van Loan School at Endicott College. He has also held a Massachusetts real estate license, NASD Series 7 and 63 licenses, and PMI Project Management Professional certification. His goal hasn’t changed since 2012: lease accounting that any company can afford and any auditor can rely on.
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