How to Automate FinQuery

Every signed lease becomes a schedule somebody has to defend

FinQuery, known for years as LeaseQuery, is the subledger that sits between a company's contracts and its general ledger. A lease gets signed by somebody in property or procurement, and from that moment it is an accounting object: a right-of-use asset, a liability, a payment schedule, a set of disclosures that will appear in the financial statements.

The people using it are accountants at companies with more contracts than a spreadsheet can honestly carry, and the firms that audit them. Alongside lease accounting the company sells modules for debt, for accruals and prepaids, for financial contract management and for GASB 96 in the public sector.

What makes this different from most finance software is who reads the output. Not a manager looking for a trend. An auditor, working through a sample, asking why this lease was classified this way and where the evidence for it is.

The schedule has to be right, and it has to still be defensible eighteen months later.

Close week is spent chasing paper other people hold

The accountant responsible for leases rarely has a lease problem. They have a document problem.

A store signs a five-year lease and the executed copy sits in a property manager's inbox for a month. A percentage-rent clause needs this quarter's gross sales, which live in the point-of-sale system somebody else runs. A landlord sends a common-area maintenance reconciliation that does not match the schedule, as a PDF, in the post. A vendor agreement for warehouse space contains an embedded lease nobody flagged, because operations signed it as a service contract.

So the close involves a run of emails asking people to send things, then a run of follow-ups because they did not.

Meanwhile the notice window on a lease the company wants out of is counting down inside a folder nobody has opened since the day it was abstracted.

FinQuery

Notice windows that do not slip Options, terminations and rent steps counted down daily, so a renewal is a decision rather than an accident.

Percentage rent checked against sales The landlord's calculation compared with the figures from your own till system before any payment is approved.

The close watched before it locks Entries posted, disclosures generated and anything still outstanding named on the day, not in the review afterwards.

FinQuery builds the schedules and generates the disclosures

Inside its own four walls the platform is thorough, and a team that has not configured all of it should start there.

Automated lease abstracts pull the terms out of an uploaded agreement, so the record does not begin with manual typing. From that record come journal entries and amortisation schedules under ASC 842, IFRS 16, GASB 87 and the rest, with dual-standard reporting where a company reports under two. Quantitative disclosure reports are generated from the same data, so the note in the statements is not built by hand. Critical date reminders fire on options, terminations and rent steps. A document repository holds the agreements, and read-only auditor access lets the audit team look without anyone exporting anything.

Every one of those acts on a lease that is already in FinQuery. That is the wall.

The lease that has not been abstracted is invisible to it. So is the sales figure a variable payment needs, the landlord's reconciliation statement, the procurement contract with a right-of-use element buried in clause nine, and the fact that the store closed in March. A critical date reminder only fires for a date somebody remembered to enter.

Critical dates can arrive with their evidence attached

A date that fires on its own is worth less than a date somebody went out and confirmed.

Every lease with a notice window inside ninety days, listed each morning with the option, the deadline and the person who has to decide, so an automatic five-year renewal is a choice rather than an accident.

The percentage-rent charge worked out against real sales figures read from the till system, before the payment is approved rather than after the landlord's version has been paid. Landlord reconciliation statements collected from the property portal and lined up against what the schedule assumes, with the difference named.

Newly executed agreements in the shared drive checked against what has actually been abstracted, so a signed lease is not sitting unrecorded through a reporting period. Vendor contracts read for right-of-use language and routed to the lease team when they look like an embedded lease, which is exactly the thing that turns up in an audit.

The line here is firm. Assembling evidence and flagging an exception is clerical. Deciding that a lease is finance rather than operating, or that an asset is impaired, is an accounting judgement with a person's name against it.

The accountant keeps the judgement, not the legwork

The sales figures, the statements and the signed copies all have to be fetched before any of that judgement can be exercised. Fetching is most of the week, and it is the part nobody trained for.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens FinQuery, the property portal, the till system and the drive where executed leases land, reads what each says, and brings back the comparison with the exceptions at the top.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, and you can watch a run and stop it. Nothing is reclassified, no journal entry is posted, and no message goes to a landlord without a person approving it.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names what it opens.