Most lease audit software is built for accountants, not tenants. Here is which tools actually help recover CAM overcharges and what each one costs in 2026.
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Find My OverchargesSee a sample report firstThe best lease audit software for commercial tenants in 2026 is CAMAudit ($79 flat fee, 14 forensic detection rules, results in under 15 minutes). CAMAudit is the only self-serve tool that reads specific lease provisions and compares them against a landlord's CAM reconciliation statement to identify overcharges by dollar amount. For ASC 842 accounting compliance, Visual Lease or LeaseQuery. For enterprise portfolio monitoring at Fortune 500 scale, Tango Analytics. For litigation-ready audits, a traditional CPA firm such as Cushman & Wakefield or JLL.
Search for "lease audit software" and most results point to Visual Lease, LeaseQuery, or MRI Software. None of those tools will tell you whether your landlord's management fee calculation is correct. That is not what they are built for.
The category is split into two fundamentally different product types, and buying the wrong one wastes both money and time. This guide, written by the founder of CAMAudit after testing reconciliation samples through CAMAudit's 14-rule detection engine, explains the difference, covers the main options in each category, and gives specific guidance on which tool fits which use case.
lease audit software: Lease audit software automates the comparison of a landlord's CAM reconciliation statement against the specific provisions of a commercial tenant's lease, flagging overcharges by category and dollar amount. Two fundamentally different product types use this term: ASC 842 compliance tools (built for accounting standards) and forensic overcharge detection tools (built to recover money from billing errors).
Type 1: ASC 842 / IFRS 16 accounting compliance tools. These are lease management platforms built for accountants and corporate real estate teams who need to classify leases under accounting standards, track critical dates, and manage portfolio-wide rent rolls. Visual Lease, LeaseQuery, Leasecake, and MRI Software all fall into this category. They are excellent at what they do. Detecting CAM overcharges is not what they do.
Type 2: Forensic overcharge detection tools. These are built specifically to compare a landlord's reconciliation statement against lease provisions and flag where the landlord billed more than the lease authorizes. This is the category most tenants actually need when they receive a CAM reconciliation.
The confusion is understandable because both categories use the word "audit." Accounting compliance tools audit your lease portfolio for financial reporting. Forensic tools audit individual reconciliation statements for overcharges. The goals, methodologies, and outputs are completely different.
If you are trying to recover money from a landlord overcharge, you need a forensic overcharge detection tool. Accounting compliance software will not tell you whether your pro-rata share denominator is correct or whether your landlord's gross-up calculation follows your lease.
40% of commercial CAM reconciliations contain material billing errors (Tango Analytics, 2023)
ASC 842 compliance tools are lease management platforms built for financial reporting, not for detecting landlord overcharges. These platforms were largely built in response to FASB's ASC 842 standard (effective for most companies in 2019), which required companies to recognize operating lease right-of-use assets and liabilities on their balance sheets for the first time. Managing that calculation across a large portfolio required software. BOMA (Building Owners and Managers Association) and IREM (Institute of Real Estate Management) standards define how expenses should be categorized, but compliance tools track those standards for accounting purposes, not for auditing whether landlords follow them correctly.
They excel at:
They do not:
For a corporate real estate controller managing 200+ leases, these are essential tools. For a single-location tenant who received a $12,000 CAM reconciliation and wants to know if it is correct, they are the wrong tool entirely.
Nine lease audit and lease management tools are compared below. CAMAudit is the only option that combines forensic overcharge detection, flat-fee pricing accessible to individual tenants, and dispute letter draft generation. Visual Lease, LeaseQuery, Leasecake, and MRI Software are ASC 842 compliance tools that do not detect CAM billing errors. CoStar is a market data platform, not a billing analysis tool. MRI Angus is a property operations platform used by landlords. Springbord provides portfolio-level BPO administration for large operators.
| Tool | Best for | Pricing | Detects overcharges? | Tenant-focused? | Key limitation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Visual Lease | Enterprise ASC 842 compliance | Custom (enterprise SaaS) | No | No | Built for accounting, not forensic billing review |
| LeaseQuery | Mid-market ASC 842 compliance | Custom (per lease) | No | No | Compliance output, not billing analysis |
| Leasecake | Small business lease tracking | ~$39/month | No | Partial | Tracks dates and rents, no reconciliation analysis |
| MRI Software | Large portfolio management | Custom (enterprise) | No | No | Portfolio admin platform, no CAM forensics |
| CoStar | Market data and comps research | Custom (subscription) | No | Partial | Market intelligence, not billing analysis |
| MRI Angus | Property operations and work orders | Custom (enterprise) | No | No | Landlord-side ops tool, no tenant billing analysis |
| lextract.io | Lease abstraction only | Per-use pricing | No | Partial | Abstraction only, no overcharge detection |
| Springbord | Portfolio-wide BPO administration | $1,500+/month (subscription) | Partial | Partial | Ongoing service, not self-serve; minimum portfolio size |
| CAMAudit | Tenant overcharge detection | $79 to $299 flat | Yes | Yes | No on-site landlord record access |
Visual Lease is one of the larger ASC 842 compliance platforms. Its strengths are critical date tracking, audit trails for lease accounting journal entries, and integrations with ERP systems like SAP and Oracle. It handles large portfolios well and has a solid implementation support network.
What it does not do: analyze a CAM reconciliation statement against your lease provisions. You can store lease documents in Visual Lease, but the platform does not extract management fee caps, pro-rata denominator definitions, or gross-up thresholds and compare them against billed amounts. That analysis happens outside the tool, manually.
Who should use it: Corporate real estate teams managing 50+ leases for ASC 842 compliance purposes. Not useful for a single-location tenant trying to audit one reconciliation.
LeaseQuery focuses on the accounting side of lease management with particular emphasis on mid-market companies. The platform generates the journal entries, disclosures, and roll-forward schedules that ASC 842 requires. It has a reasonably clean interface for abstracting lease data.
The same limitation applies: lease data sits in the platform, but the tool does not perform reconciliation analysis. Whether the billed CAM matches what the lease permits is not a calculation LeaseQuery makes.
Who should use it: Accounting teams under ASC 842 requirements managing a lease portfolio. Not relevant for forensic CAM review.
Leasecake targets small businesses and single-location tenants who need basic lease tracking: renewal reminder dates, rent escalation schedules, contact information for landlords. The pricing is accessible and the interface is simple.
The limitation is meaningful for this comparison: it tracks what your lease says you owe, not whether what your landlord is billing matches that. There is no reconciliation analysis capability.
Who should use it: Small business owners who want to avoid missing a renewal deadline or forgetting a rent step-up. Not useful for CAM billing disputes.
MRI is a large commercial real estate technology platform covering property management, accounting, and investment analytics. Its lease administration module is genuinely capable for large portfolios.
MRI's CAM module allows property managers to calculate and bill CAM. That orientation is worth noting: MRI is used extensively by landlords and property managers to generate reconciliations, not by tenants to audit them. MRI does not help a tenant verify whether the reconciliation it just received is accurate.
Who should use it: Property management companies and large real estate operators. Not the right tool for a tenant auditing a reconciliation.
Springbord is a business process outsourcing firm, not self-serve software. It handles portfolio administration on an ongoing subscription basis for large multi-location tenants. Its service includes CAM reconciliation review as part of ongoing lease administration.
Springbord does detect billing errors, which puts it in a different category from pure ASC 842 compliance tools. The limitation is that it requires an ongoing subscription relationship, is priced for portfolios, and has a minimum viable portfolio size that makes it impractical for tenants with a handful of leases.
Who should use it: National retailers, restaurant chains, or healthcare systems with 30+ leases who want ongoing CAM monitoring across the portfolio. Not viable for individual lease audits.
CoStar is primarily a commercial real estate market data platform covering property listings, lease comps, and market analytics. It is used by brokers, landlords, appraisers, and corporate real estate teams for market intelligence: who is leasing space, at what rates, and in which submarkets.
CoStar does not analyze CAM reconciliation statements. It has no mechanism for comparing a landlord's operating cost billing against a tenant's specific lease provisions. Some tenants and their brokers use CoStar during lease negotiations to benchmark market rent and deal terms, which is a legitimate use case. But if you have already signed a lease and received a reconciliation, CoStar is not the tool you need.
Who should use it: Brokers, corporate real estate teams, and analysts who need market data to support leasing decisions. Not useful for auditing a reconciliation you already received.
MRI Angus is a property operations platform originally designed for building management teams. It handles work orders, preventive maintenance scheduling, tenant service requests, and vendor management. MRI acquired Angus Systems to extend its property management suite into operational workflows.
The platform is used by landlords and property managers, not by tenants. Tenants typically interact with MRI Angus only through a tenant portal for submitting service requests. There is no tenant-facing billing analysis capability. Whether a management fee is billed correctly under a tenant's lease is outside the scope of what MRI Angus does.
Who should use it: Property management teams managing building operations and maintenance workflows. Not relevant for tenants auditing billing accuracy.
Lextract is a lease abstraction tool that uses AI to extract structured data from lease documents. It can pull key terms, critical dates, rent escalation schedules, and CAM provision language from a lease PDF and output it in structured form. For law firms, corporate real estate departments, and brokers who need to process large volumes of lease documents efficiently, it is a purpose-built tool.
The limitation in this context: lextract abstracts what the lease says, but it does not compare that against what the landlord actually billed. It cannot tell you whether a $12,000 CAM reconciliation contains an error. That analysis step, comparing extracted lease terms against billed amounts line by line, is what forensic tools like CAMAudit do. Lextract and CAMAudit address sequential steps in the audit process: abstraction first, then detection.
Who should use it: Teams with high-volume lease abstraction needs. Not useful for checking whether a specific reconciliation is accurate.
I built CAMAudit specifically because nothing in the market served tenants who needed to audit a single reconciliation without spending $2,000 to $5,000 on a traditional firm engagement. The problem it solves is specific: upload a lease and a CAM reconciliation statement, get a findings report showing which of 14 error types are present and what each overcharge amount is.
The 14 detection rules cover management fee overcharges, pro-rata share errors, gross-up violations, CAM cap violations, base year errors, controllable expense cap violations, gross lease charges, excluded service charges, insurance overcharges, tax overallocation, utility overcharges, and common area misclassification. Six rules use deterministic arithmetic. Six use AI-assisted classification of lease language and expense categories.
Processing takes under 15 minutes. The free scan shows which error categories were detected. A paid audit credit ($79) unlocks the full findings with dollar amounts, the specific lease provisions violated, and dispute letter draft generation.
Pricing: $79 for 1 audit, $199 for 3 audits, $299 for 5 audits. 30-day money-back guarantee.
Who should use it: Any commercial tenant in a NNN or modified gross lease who wants to verify their CAM reconciliation is accurate. The flat fee works at any CAM spend level above roughly $5,000 per year.
What it does not do: Conduct on-site inspection of the landlord's general ledger and vendor invoices, negotiate directly with the landlord, or produce a signed CPA opinion letter. For tenants who need those things, a traditional audit firm (Cushman & Wakefield, JLL, National Lease Advisors, or a Big Four firm like Deloitte or KPMG) is still necessary.
Five criteria separate effective lease audit software from tools that store lease data without analyzing it: lease provision extraction, overcharge detection rules, rule coverage depth, dispute letter output, and pricing transparency. If you are evaluating tools specifically for catching billing errors (not for ASC 842 compliance), ask these questions before buying.
Does it read my lease or just store it? Most compliance tools store lease documents but do not extract specific provisions and compare them against billing data. A forensic tool must extract management fee caps, pro-rata denominator definitions, gross-up occupancy thresholds, CAM cap structures, and exclusion lists from your actual lease text.
Does it detect overcharges or track compliance? These are different operations. Compliance tracking tells you when a rent escalation is due or when a renewal option must be exercised. Overcharge detection tells you whether the landlord's math is correct under the lease's specific terms.
What rules does it check? The 14 error categories listed above cover the full range of common CAM billing issues. A tool that only checks management fee percentages will miss gross-up violations, which appear in 25 to 35% of audited leases.
What happens with a finding? Does the tool generate a dispute letter draft, or just flag a potential issue and leave you to write the letter yourself? The dispute letter is where findings become money.
What is the pricing model? Per-audit flat fees work for tenants who audit once per year. Subscriptions make sense if you are managing ongoing administration for a large portfolio. Contingency models (percentage of recovery) can be prohibited by your lease's audit rights clause.
The right tool depends on what you are trying to accomplish, not on which product has the most features. Here is a direct breakdown by tenant type.
Best for small business tenants with under $100K CAM per year: CAMAudit
At this CAM spend level, the economics of hiring a traditional audit firm rarely work. A contingency-based CPA firm typically charges 20% to 30% of recovered amounts and requires a minimum recovery threshold to take the engagement. A retainer engagement can run $2,500 to $5,000 before they start. CAMAudit's $79 flat fee means a finding of $500 pays for itself 6x over. The self-serve model requires uploading a lease and reconciliation, not scheduling access to a CPA. For any single-location tenant, service-based small business, or restaurant operator who received a CAM reconciliation and wants to verify it, CAMAudit is the practical choice.
Best for CFOs managing 10 or more locations: Springbord or a BPO firm
At 10+ locations, the per-audit economics shift. Managing individual audits per reconciliation becomes operationally complex. A BPO firm like Springbord provides ongoing monitoring across the whole portfolio as a subscription service, which means you get systematic coverage rather than spotcheck audits. The tradeoff is minimum portfolio size and ongoing subscription cost. For CFOs who also need ASC 842 compliance reporting, pairing a BPO service for reconciliation review with Visual Lease or LeaseQuery for accounting compliance is the standard enterprise-scale approach.
Best for tenants actively in a billing dispute: CAMAudit + legal counsel
When you are already in a dispute with a landlord over a CAM charge, you need documentation, not just a software flag. CAMAudit produces findings with the specific lease provisions violated and dollar amounts per error category. That output becomes the basis for a dispute letter draft. For disputes that escalate beyond informal negotiation, you will need qualified commercial real estate counsel. CAMAudit provides the forensic foundation; an attorney handles the negotiation and litigation risk. Do not start a dispute with only a software report and no legal review.
Best for tenants who have never audited before: CAMAudit free scan
CAMAudit's free scan runs the full 14-rule detection engine and shows which error categories were detected. You do not need an account or a credit card. If the scan finds nothing, you have spent zero dollars and have more confidence in your statement. If it detects a management fee overcharge or a pro-rata share error, you can decide whether the finding size justifies a $79 paid audit. The free scan is the lowest-cost way to determine whether a deeper audit is worth pursuing.
CAMAudit is built around 14 forensic detection rules derived from the most common CAM billing error patterns. Unlike compliance tools that track lease terms in a database, CAMAudit reads your specific lease and your specific reconciliation statement, then runs each rule against the extracted data. Here is what each rule checks:
Math-based rules (deterministic arithmetic):
Classification-based rules (AI-assisted lease provision matching):
The detection engine runs all 14 rules on every upload. You do not choose which rules to apply. The scan report shows which rules triggered findings and the dollar amount associated with each.
The best lease audit software for most commercial tenants is CAMAudit at $79 per audit: it is the only self-serve tool that runs 14 forensic detection rules against a specific lease and reconciliation statement. For ASC 842 compliance and portfolio management: Visual Lease, LeaseQuery, or MRI depending on portfolio size and ERP integration requirements.
For forensic CAM overcharge detection on individual leases: CAMAudit at $79 per audit is the only self-serve option purpose-built for this use case. For tenants with very large CAM bills requiring on-site landlord access, a boutique contingency firm or Big Four engagement is the right escalation path.
For ongoing portfolio-wide monitoring: Springbord or a similar BPO firm once your portfolio reaches 30+ leases.
For pure lease abstraction (not audit), lextract.io is the purpose-built option.
For more detail on how CAMAudit's 14 detection rules work, see the CAM audit methodology. For a full pricing comparison across provider types, see the CAM audit cost guide.
What is lease audit software?
Lease audit software refers to two different product types. ASC 842 compliance tools (Visual Lease, LeaseQuery, MRI) help accountants manage lease portfolios for financial reporting purposes. Forensic overcharge detection tools (CAMAudit) compare a landlord's CAM reconciliation statement against specific lease provisions to identify billing errors. If you need to verify whether your CAM charges are correct, you need the forensic type, not the compliance type.
Does Visual Lease detect CAM overcharges?
No. Visual Lease is an ASC 842 lease accounting compliance platform. It stores lease documents and generates financial reporting outputs, but it does not compare a CAM reconciliation statement against lease provisions to identify overcharges. It is built for portfolio management and accounting, not forensic billing review.
Can lease management software audit my reconciliation for errors?
Most lease management platforms (Visual Lease, LeaseQuery, Leasecake, MRI) do not audit reconciliation statements for billing errors. They track lease terms, manage critical dates, and support ASC 842 compliance. CAMAudit is purpose-built for reconciliation analysis: it extracts provisions from your specific lease and compares them against the billed amounts line by line.
How much does lease audit software cost?
ASC 842 compliance tools typically charge per lease per month on an enterprise SaaS model, with total costs scaling with portfolio size. Prices are not publicly listed but typically run thousands of dollars per month for mid-to-large portfolios. CAMAudit charges $79 for a single audit, $199 for three audits, and $299 for five audits, with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Is there software that catches CAM billing errors automatically?
Yes. CAMAudit applies 14 detection rules to every uploaded reconciliation, checking for management fee overcharges, pro-rata share errors, gross-up violations, CAM cap violations, base year errors, excluded expense charges, and six additional error categories. The analysis runs in under 15 minutes and produces a dollar-amount finding for each detected issue.
What is the difference between lease accounting software and lease audit software?
Lease accounting software (Visual Lease, LeaseQuery) manages financial reporting obligations under ASC 842 and IFRS 16. It classifies leases, tracks right-of-use assets, and generates journal entries. Lease audit software, in the forensic sense, reviews a specific reconciliation statement against specific lease terms to identify overcharges. The two tools solve different problems for different users.
What is the best lease audit software for tenants?
The best lease audit software for tenants is one built for forensic overcharge detection, not ASC 842 compliance. CAMAudit is the only tenant-specific tool that reads your actual lease provisions, applies all 14 CAM overcharge detection rules, and outputs findings with dollar amounts and dispute letter drafts in under 15 minutes. Enterprise tools like Visual Lease, LeaseQuery, and MRI track lease dates and financial reporting, not reconciliation billing errors.
