A fast-food franchise with 40,000 global locations needed expert advice to improve a tedious business process related to its commercial leasing agreements. The company had 25 full-time outsourced employees who were responsible for manually reading and re-entering data from 30,000 lease documents annually. This manual method was prone to errors and required rework, especially considering that each new lease document could exceed hundreds of pages.

New Rules Create A Greater Challenge for Lease Management

In 2016, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) replaced ASC 840 with ASC 842. This change introduced a new set of rules for how organizations report leases on balance sheets. The new rule affects all leases for warehouses, vehicles, phones, and other equipment. This change represents the most significant update to lease accounting since 1976.

ASC 842 divides leases into operating and finance leases (capital leases). Previously, only capital leases were listed on the balance sheet. Many companies now need to keep a centralized record of their leases, as they were not required to do so in the past. Lease agreements are often hard to track and classify because they are buried in other contracts.

The new FASB requirements impose an additional burden on all US companies, requiring more resources to complete the work. Tackling this complex issue is crucial, as companies could face debt covenant failures and future financing risks.

To comply with the new FASB rules, the fast-food franchise mentioned in the introduction must extract more than 350 fields from lease-related documents weekly and input the data into their lease management system. The challenge is compounded by commercial leasing agents submitting lease documents of varying quality, types (such as PDFs, images, and email attachments), and languages. The documents also contain handwriting, checkboxes, and tables, making them difficult to process uniformly.

Reveal Group experts have developed an innovative solution to this challenge that links SS&C Blue Prism Technology, ABBYY Vantage, and GPT-4 turbo.

Bringing Generative AI into the mix

After several attempts with different advisory firms and technologies, the client was eager to find a resolution. In the interest of time, Reveal Group experts repurposed an array of technical components that were previously built for miscellaneous client needs.

While trialing several technology combinations across five different approaches, its experts recognized that one yielded a vastly superior result. ABBYY Vantage is a powerful IDP solution for categorizing the different agreement types and extracting segments of the agreement (Preamble, Premises, Renewal Options). Meanwhile, GPT-4 Turbo provided accurate field-level extraction, especially when fed a specific segment of the agreement.

GPT4 and ABBYY Vantage created a consolidated user experience, providing results before any field-level training. This approach leverages IDP for classification and segmentation and GenAI for field extraction. Integrating Generative AI, IDP, and RPA to automate data extraction and entry achieved an 82% accuracy rate. For the small subset of fields falling outside the configured confidence threshold, ABBYY Vantage’s manual review station is utilized to enable human users to correct machine-extracted values. The machine learning model learns from the human-corrected values and improves over time, resulting in reduced manual review requirements.

An End-to-End Solution for Lease Extraction

Solution Overview:

1. Document Ingestion: Blue Prism Digital Workers gather documents from Outlook and send them to ABBYY Vantage.
2. Classification: ABBYY Vantage classifies the document type.
3. Segmentation: ABBYY Vantage parses the document to GPT-4 turbo with an associated prompt.
4. Field Extraction: GPT-4 turbo extracts key fields from each segment.
5. Manual Review Station: Field extractions are presented in ABBYY Vantage’s native verification station for manual review. Users can jump to the relevant section of low-confidence fields, which dramatically expedites corrections.
6. Data Entry: Once the manual review is complete, Blue Prism Digital Workers perform formatting cleanup, match extractions to pick lists, and populate the leasing application.