Finance and accounting teams adopting LeaseQuery often assume that having modern lease accounting software means their lease costs are under control. LeaseQuery is an excellent tool for what it is designed to do. The problem is that what it does and what CAM audit does are different activities that address different risks. For a similar comparison with another widely used platform, see Visual Lease and CAM overcharges, which covers the same gap from the Visual Lease user perspective.
Confusing the two leads to a specific failure mode: a company with clean ASC 842 compliance and organized lease records that has been overpaying CAM charges for years without anyone catching it.
This article explains the distinction clearly so accounting teams can understand the gap and close it.
What LeaseQuery is built for
LeaseQuery is lease accounting software, built primarily to help companies comply with ASC 842, the FASB accounting standard that requires most operating leases to appear on the balance sheet.
Before ASC 842, operating leases were off-balance-sheet. After ASC 842, companies with lease terms over 12 months must recognize a right-of-use (ROU) asset and a corresponding lease liability on the balance sheet, and amortize them over the lease term.
LeaseQuery automates this process. Its core capabilities include:
Right-of-use asset and lease liability calculations. LeaseQuery calculates the initial ROU asset and lease liability based on the lease term, discount rate, and payment schedule. It handles the ongoing amortization and interest accretion journal entries automatically.
ASC 842 journal entries and disclosures. The platform generates the journal entries required for lease accounting and produces the disclosure outputs needed for financial statement footnotes and audit support.
Lease payment schedule management. LeaseQuery tracks scheduled lease payments, including rent escalations, and matches them against invoices received. It alerts users to upcoming payments and critical dates.
Lease portfolio visibility. For companies managing dozens or hundreds of leases, LeaseQuery provides a centralized view of the lease portfolio, expiration dates, renewal options, and financial summaries.
These are genuinely useful capabilities, particularly for public companies and private companies with significant lease portfolios subject to audit scrutiny.
What LeaseQuery does not do
LeaseQuery does not verify whether the landlord CAM reconciliation is mathematically and contractually correct.
This is not a gap or shortcoming in LeaseQuery. It is simply outside the scope of what lease accounting software is designed to do. But it matters because many accounting teams do not realize the gap exists.
Here is a concrete illustration of the problem.
A commercial tenant receives their annual CAM reconciliation statement from the landlord. The statement shows $87,000 in total operating expenses allocated to the tenant for the year, after applying the pro-rata share. The tenant made $72,000 in estimated monthly payments during the year. The reconciliation shows a true-up of $15,000 due.
In LeaseQuery, the accounting team records the $15,000 true-up as a variable lease cost, books the journal entry, and updates the lease payment schedule. The ASC 842 treatment is correct. The books are clean.
What LeaseQuery did not check: whether the management fee rate applied in the $87,000 calculation exceeded the lease cap, whether the pro-rata share denominator used by the landlord matches the lease definition, whether any capital improvement costs were included in the operating expense pool without being amortized, and whether the landlord passed through excluded overhead costs.
If the landlord applied a 6% management fee against a lease that caps it at 4%, and if the total operating expense pool was $1.2 million, the management fee overcharge on the tenant share would be approximately $4,800. That $4,800 flows through the system as a legitimate variable lease cost under ASC 842. It is not flagged anywhere in LeaseQuery. It is not an accounting error. It is a lease compliance violation that only a CAM audit would catch.
The $40,000 reconciliation bill that passes through without a flag
The management fee example above involves a relatively small dollar amount. But when the same error compounds across a multi-million-dollar CAM pool, the numbers get significant.
Consider a retail tenant in a larger shopping center. The total CAM pool for the property is $4 million. The management fee cap in the lease is 4%. The landlord has been applying 6%. The tenant pro-rata share is 3%.
Annual management fee overcharge: $4M x 2% excess x 3% share = $2,400 per year.
Across a 5-year lease term, that is $12,000. Not enormous, but real. Add a capital expense misclassification (a $500,000 parking lot replacement that should have been amortized over 10 years but was expensed in full in year 3), and the tenant share of that misclassification is $500,000 x 3% = $15,000 in year 3 alone.
Neither of these violations generates a flag in LeaseQuery. Both pass through as variable lease costs. Both are caught by a CAM audit that checks the reconciliation against the lease terms.
When to use each tool
LeaseQuery and CAM audit software address different compliance risks and operate at different points in the lease lifecycle.
LeaseQuery handles: Financial statement compliance under ASC 842, accurate balance sheet representation of lease obligations, audit-ready lease accounting documentation, and portfolio-level lease payment tracking.
CAM audit handles: Contractual compliance with lease billing provisions, verification that the landlord calculated the operating expense reconciliation correctly, identification of specific overcharge amounts with supporting documentation, and evidence for dispute correspondence.
A complete lease financial management practice uses both. LeaseQuery for the accounting and compliance layer. CAMAudit or a similar tool for the annual CAM verification layer. For teams that track multiple leases in spreadsheets rather than a dedicated platform, what spreadsheets miss in CAM overcharges covers the same verification gap from that starting point.
I built CAMAudit because the CAM verification layer was missing for most tenants. The tools available for lease accounting are sophisticated. The tools for verifying the landlord math are sparse. Start a free CAM scan on CAMAudit by uploading your reconciliation and lease documents, and you get a structured findings report covering the categories most commonly associated with billing errors.
Frequently asked questions
Does LeaseQuery have any CAM verification features?
LeaseQuery includes lease abstraction and variable payment tracking. It does not perform lease-level compliance verification of the landlord calculation methodology. Tracking that a payment was received and recording it correctly is different from verifying that the payment amount was calculated per the lease terms.
How should accounting teams handle CAM reconciliation review under ASC 842?
Under ASC 842, variable lease costs are expensed as incurred. The accounting treatment of the true-up is straightforward. The question is whether the true-up amount was calculated correctly by the landlord. That question is answered by comparing the reconciliation to the lease terms, not by the ASC 842 accounting entry. For a CPA-specific guide to that comparison process, see CPA guide: reviewing client CAM reconciliation statements.
Can an auditor catch CAM overcharges during a financial statement audit?
A financial statement auditor verifies that the accounting treatment is correct, not that the underlying charge from the landlord is correct. If the accounting team accepted an incorrect reconciliation and booked it correctly under ASC 842, the audit would not flag the underlying overcharge. The auditor is not performing a lease compliance review.
What is the typical timeline for CAM verification?
The annual reconciliation statement typically arrives within 60-90 days after year-end. Most leases give tenants 90-180 days from receipt to dispute charges. Running the CAM verification immediately after receiving the reconciliation gives the most time to request documentation and follow up before the window closes.
How does CAMAudit complement a LeaseQuery workflow?
The two tools operate independently. LeaseQuery manages lease accounting and administration. CAMAudit verifies the reconciliation math. Once the CAMAudit findings report is complete, the accounting team records the appropriate journal entries (or dispute credits) in LeaseQuery. The tools address different questions about the same lease relationship.