A CAM audit is a formal review of a landlord's CAM reconciliation statement to verify that charges are accurate, properly calculated, and consistent with the lease. The audit compares the statement line items against the lease's expense definition, pro-rata share formula, gross-up provision, and any caps.

How long does a CAM audit take?

With CAMAudit, a full forensic audit runs in under 15 minutes. Traditional CPA-led audits take 4 to 8 weeks and require scheduling, document collection, and manual review. The speed advantage of CAMAudit comes from automating the extraction and detection steps.

What documents do I need for a CAM audit?

You need your commercial lease (including all addenda and exhibits) and your CAM reconciliation statement from your landlord. The reconciliation is usually sent annually, within 90 to 120 days after the close of the lease year. If you haven't received it yet, request it in writing.

What does a CAM audit actually check?

CAMAudit checks 14 categories: management fee overcharge, pro-rata share error, gross-up violation, CAM cap violation, base year error, controllable expense cap overcharge, estimated payment true-up error, gross lease charges, excluded service charges, insurance overcharge, tax overallocation, utility overcharge, common area misclassification, and landlord overhead pass-through.

Do I need an attorney to dispute CAM charges?

Not necessarily. CAMAudit generates a dispute letter draft grounded in your specific findings and lease language. Many tenants resolve CAM disputes by sending this letter directly to their landlord or property manager. For large disputes or adversarial landlords, involving an attorney is advisable.

Trullion Alternatives for Tenants Who Need to Recover CAM Overcharges

40% of CAM reconciliations contain material errors (Tango Analytics/PredictAP, 2023)

Trullion shows up in a lot of searches for "lease audit software." The name sounds right, and the product does touch leases. But if you're a commercial tenant looking to recover CAM overcharges, Trullion is not the tool you need.

This article clarifies what Trullion actually does, what it doesn't do, and what tenants looking for forensic CAM reconciliation review should use instead.

What Trullion Actually Does

Trullion is a lease accounting compliance platform. Its primary function is helping companies meet ASC 842 (US GAAP) and IFRS 16 (international) lease accounting standards. These are financial reporting requirements that govern how leases appear on a company's balance sheet.

Its customers are typically:

Public companies required to capitalize operating leases under ASC 842
Accounting teams managing large lease portfolios for financial close purposes
Landlords and property companies who need lease data feeding into financial reporting systems

Trullion's product automates lease data extraction, classification of operating vs. finance leases, and journal entry generation for compliant lease accounting. It integrates with ERP systems like NetSuite and SAP. That's a real and useful product — for the companies that need it.

What Trullion Does Not Do

Trullion does not perform forensic CAM auditing. It does not detect whether your landlord overcharged you on management fees, calculated your pro-rata share incorrectly, violated a CAM cap, or passed through expenses your lease explicitly excludes.

Specifically, Trullion does not:

Compare your landlord's CAM reconciliation statement against your lease terms
Flag line items that are ineligible under your specific lease
Calculate whether management fees exceed the cap stated in your agreement
Check whether gross-up provisions were applied correctly to your occupancy percentage
Generate a dispute letter when overcharges are found
Help you recover money from a landlord

ASC 842 compliance and forensic CAM auditing are entirely separate workflows. ASC 842 is about how you report lease obligations in your financial statements. A CAM audit is about whether your landlord billed you correctly. These two things share the word "lease" and nothing else operationally.

"I've talked to CPAs who evaluated Trullion thinking it would help their clients with CAM disputes. It doesn't — and the confusion costs time. Trullion is accounting software. CAMAudit is a recovery tool." — Angel Campa, Founder of CAMAudit

The Confusion — and Why It Happens

The overlap in language creates the confusion. Both Trullion and a CAM audit tool deal with lease documents. Both extract data from leases. Both produce reports that look like they're about lease compliance.

But "compliance" means something different in each context:

In Trullion's world, compliance means your balance sheet accurately reflects your lease liabilities under GAAP.
In a CAM audit, compliance means your landlord charged you what your lease actually says they can charge.

A tenant can be fully ASC 842 compliant — every lease properly capitalized, every journal entry correct — and still be paying $15,000 a year in CAM overcharges because the landlord's reconciliation included capital improvements that the lease explicitly excludes.

Those two problems require completely different tools.

What Tenants Who Want CAM Recovery Actually Need

If you received a CAM reconciliation statement and want to know whether you were overcharged, you need a forensic CAM audit — not lease accounting software.

The workflow looks like this:

Pull your executed lease and the landlord's CAM reconciliation statement
Run detection rules against both documents — math checks for fee caps and pro-rata share, classification checks for excluded expense categories
Identify specific overcharges with dollar amounts
Generate documentation to support a dispute

That's what a forensic CAM audit produces. Trullion does none of those steps.

Alternatives for Tenants Focused on CAM Recovery

Option	What It Does	Best For
CAMAudit	Automated forensic CAM audit — 14 detection rules, findings report, dispute letter draft	Tenants with 1–25 locations; fast, flat-fee
LeaseLens	Lease abstraction — pulls key terms from lease documents	Teams that need structured lease data extraction before auditing
National Lease Advisors	Contingency CAM audit firm	Large portfolios where you prefer no upfront cost and can give up 33–40% of recovery
CPA / lease attorney	Manual review, complex disputes, litigation support	Highly ambiguous lease language, multi-year disputes headed toward legal action
Trullion	ASC 842 / IFRS 16 accounting compliance	Public companies and large accounting teams managing balance sheet reporting

CAMAudit for Recovery

I built CAMAudit to handle the detection and documentation steps automatically. Upload your lease and reconciliation statement, and our detection engine runs 14 checks in under 15 minutes:

Math rules (deterministic Python): management fee overcharge, pro-rata share error, gross-up violations, CAM cap compliance, base year errors, controllable expense cap, true-up accuracy
Classification rules (AI-assisted): expenses that shouldn't appear in CAM under your lease type — landlord overhead, capital improvements, excluded services, insurance overcharges, tax misallocations

When overcharges are found, CAMAudit generates a dispute letter draft grounded in the specific findings. You're not left translating a findings report into landlord correspondence — the draft is ready to review and send.

Pricing is flat: $79 for one audit, $179 for three, $249 for five. No hourly billing, no percentage of recovery.

LeaseLens for Abstraction

If your problem is earlier in the pipeline — you have a stack of leases and you need the key terms extracted and structured before you can audit anything — LeaseLens handles lease abstraction. It pulls clause-level data from lease documents into a structured format. That output can then feed into an audit workflow.

LeaseLens doesn't do audit detection itself. It's a data extraction step, not a recovery tool.

Contingency Auditors for Large Portfolios

If you have a large portfolio and prefer to pay nothing upfront, a contingency firm like National Lease Advisors takes cases on a 33–40% cut of whatever they recover. For small overcharges, that model leaves less in your pocket than a flat-fee audit. For large recoveries across many locations, the math can work in your favor — but you're giving up meaningful money for the privilege of not paying upfront.

The CAM overcharge estimator can help you model whether the contingency cut is worth it for your expected recovery amount.

See also: Contingency Fee vs. Flat-Fee CAM Audit for the full break-even analysis.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can Trullion detect CAM overcharges?

No. Trullion is an ASC 842 / IFRS 16 accounting compliance tool. It does not compare reconciliation statements against lease terms, does not run overcharge detection rules, and does not produce dispute documentation. If you're looking for CAM overcharge recovery, you need a different tool entirely.

What is ASC 842, and why doesn't it help with CAM audits?

ASC 842 is a US GAAP accounting standard that requires companies to recognize operating lease liabilities on their balance sheets. It governs how lease obligations appear in financial statements. A CAM audit, by contrast, is a review of whether your landlord's billing matches what your lease says they can charge. One is a financial reporting requirement. The other is a billing accuracy check. They don't overlap.

I'm a CPA helping a client with their lease. Which tool applies?

If your client needs ASC 842 compliance for their financial close, Trullion may be relevant. If your client received a CAM reconciliation and you want to check whether it's accurate — whether the charges are permitted under the lease, whether the math is correct — that's a CAM audit. CAMAudit is built for exactly that: upload the lease and reconciliation, get a findings report and dispute letter draft. The flat-fee structure ($79 per audit) makes it straightforward to add to a client engagement without a large audit cost.

Trullion Alternatives for Tenants Who Need to Recover CAM Overcharges