Planon lease accounting, Planon lease management and lease abstraction for Planon onboarding

Not as a document reader. Planon is clear about the division of labor on its own Lease Accounting Solution page: lease data comes in "from your existing contract administrations or by the integration with specialized lease abstraction software", and lease documents "can be scanned and analyzed by specialized lease abstraction software that can be integrated with this solution". In other words, Planon expects somebody else to read the PDF.

That is a sensible design for an integrated workplace management system. Planon is built to hold the portfolio, run the calculations, manage renewals and indexations, and export compliant postings to the general ledger. Reading a 90-page office lease with four amendments is a different job, and it is the job that sets the go-live date. The same split shows up on SAP RE-FX lease abstraction and on older IBM TRIRIGA lease abstraction releases. Archibus works the same way, and its help says new users import lease abstracts to get started, see Archibus lease management.

Planon documents its lease accounting fields publicly in the Planon Cloud web help, which makes the abstraction target unusually concrete. These are the inputs that come straight out of the lease document, as opposed to settings your accounting team chooses.

The discount rate, the accounting standard and the classification answers are judgments, not extractions, but they depend on the extracted facts. You cannot decide whether an option is reasonably certain without first knowing exactly what the option says. Our critical date extraction and rent abatement extraction pages show what those two pieces look like in the output.

Planon offers two routes for leases that already exist, and they need different inputs from the document.

Onboarding existing contracts. Planon describes this as entering contracts that already sit on the balance sheet, either by hand or through Planon as a Platform, Enterprise Talk or the Simple Data Interface. It is explicitly not for a first-time application of the standard. The carrying values of the lease liability, right-of-use asset and accumulated depreciation go in as offset values, calculation starts at the onboarding date, and Planon cannot make retroactive modifications before that date. Planon also lists accumulated impairment, headleases and subleases as not yet supported on this route. For onboarding you need the current terms of each lease, accurately, plus the remaining option and payment profile from today forward.

Migrating contracts from a former system. Here Planon asks you to enter the contract "as it was originally signed", activate it, and then register only the future changes. That means the abstract has to separate the original lease from each amendment, with effective dates, rather than collapse everything into one current snapshot.

Both routes fail the same way when the lease file is read in a hurry: an amendment that moved the expiration is missed, or a free-rent rider never makes it into the payment profile. Getting the abstract right first is cheaper than reopening contract lines after the auditors find it.

Nothing, and that is normal for an enterprise IWMS. Planon sells on a quote, scoped to the modules you license, the deployment model and the size of the portfolio. Directory sites print ranges for Planon, but none of them cite Planon, so we do not repeat them here.

The contrast with IBM is useful if Planon and IBM Maximo Real Estate and Facilities are both on your list. IBM publishes a starting figure for its Maximo Essentials Lease Management package of under US$40K per year, with one environment and up to 500 leases. We compare the two pricing models, and where the abstraction cost lands in each, in Planon pricing vs IBM Maximo lease management pricing. For the wider market, the lease abstraction software pricing roundup lists which vendors publish a number at all.

Whatever the platform quote turns out to be, the reading of the back catalog is a separate line. It is either internal hours, an outsourced abstraction project, or software like ours at $49 a month for 15 leases, $149 for 75 or $399 for 250.

Planon was founded in 1982 by Pierre Guelen and is headquartered in Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Schneider Electric took a 25% minority stake in December 2020, and in July 2024 it signed an agreement to raise that to a controlling 80% stake, consolidating Planon into its Energy Management business. Planon continues to sell under its own name, with Real Estate Management, Lease Accounting, Space and Workplace, Asset and Maintenance and Energy and Sustainability solutions on one platform, plus Planon REM4SAP for organizations that run real estate inside SAP.

For a lease buyer the ownership matters mostly as a signal of direction: Planon is investing in the building and energy side of the platform. Lease accounting is a mature, documented module, but the document reading still sits outside it.

• Amendments abstracted as if they were the original. On the migration route Planon wants the original contract plus future changes. A current-state snapshot loses the history Planon needs to activate the contract correctly.
• Free rent keyed as a zero amount. Planon has a Postponed payment date field for rent-free periods on finance leases. A zero line in the payment schedule produces a different result and is harder to audit.
• Options without their notice windows. Option detail records which options are included in the lease term. If the notice date is missing, nobody gets the reminder in time to exercise or decline.
• Incentives and initial direct costs left in the side letter. They reduce or increase the right-of-use asset, and they are routinely buried outside the main lease.
• Subleases pushed through onboarding. Planon lists headlease and sublease as not yet supported on the onboarding route, so flag subleases during abstraction and route them deliberately.

Upload the executed lease and every amendment, rider and side letter. The AI reads the full document set and produces a structured abstract with each field linked to the page and clause it came from. A reviewer on your team checks the flagged fields, approves the abstract, and exports Excel or CSV in the column order your Planon import or Simple Data Interface template expects. Abstraction can start before Planon is configured, because the dataset is independent of the target system.

Teams on a Planon go-live usually also have a broader ASC 842 implementation workstream running, and the same reviewed abstracts feed both. If your shortlist is still open, our best lease abstraction and administration software comparison covers the alternatives.