Create a Lease

You can create a lease two ways: upload a lease document and let AI read it into a draft, or enter the lease by hand. Both paths end the same way: the lease is saved as a draft, and someone on your team publishes it when it is correct. The published version is the lease in force.

Create a lease from a document

Uploading is the fastest path when you have the signed lease in hand. Upload the document, and AI reads it into a draft lease, extracting each value with a link back to the page of the document it came from. A person on your team reviews the draft and publishes it; nothing you upload changes a live lease.

For the full walkthrough, including how to answer the follow-up questions the AI can raise, see Upload your first leases.

Enter a lease by hand

Enter a lease by hand when you do not have a document to upload, or when you want full control over every value from the start. The lease record is organized into sections, and you work through them in roughly the order below.

1. Start a new lease. If your lease is a French commercial lease or another jurisdiction Leasecake supports, you can start from a jurisdiction-aware template instead of a blank record: the lease's governing law decides which templates are offered. The app is available in English and French.

2. Fill in the Details and Parties sections: what the lease covers, the premises, and the landlord, tenant, guarantors, and other parties.

3. Set the Term and Rent. Rent can be a fixed schedule, step increases, percentage rent, or escalations indexed to US CPI, the French INSEE indices (ICC, ILAT, ILC, IRL), or a custom index. You can also add prorations, late fees, holdover terms, incentives, and related costs.

4. Add the lease's Options: renewal, termination, and purchase rights. Exercising an option later changes the lease term, so record the notice windows now.

5. Fill in Incentives and Risk Controls. Risk Controls covers security deposits, guarantees, and insurance, including certificates of insurance.

6. Add Assets, Clauses, and any Custom Fields your organization has configured.

7. Review the whole lease, then publish it.

What a lease record contains

Every lease, however it was created, has the same structure. Use this as a map when you review a draft or fill in a lease by hand.

The lease record has these sections:

• Details

• Parties

• Term

• Rent

• Options

• Incentives

• Assets

• Clauses

• Risk Controls

• Custom Fields

Each lease has its own pages:

• Overview

• Contract

• Accounting

• Payments

• Transactions

• Contacts

• Custom Fields

• Change History

Work with drafts

A lease exists in two states: the published version is the lease in force, and any unpublished edit is a draft. Edit a draft and publish it when it is correct; the draft has no effect on critical dates, payments, or accounting until it is published.

From the lease list, you can work on several leases at once with bulk actions: publish drafts, discard drafts, or delete leases.

After the lease is published

Publishing is the start of the lease's life, not the end. Critical dates such as expiration and option notice windows are derived from the published lease and appear on your dashboard; see Track critical dates and payments. Lease accountants then give the lease a book for each accounting standard it is reported under and measure it; see How lease accounting works for that workflow.