One51 Success Stories
Modernising lease audit operations with agentic AI for scale and efficiency
A leading audit, assurance, tax and advisory firm in Australia, with 1,500+ professionals and global backing, faced a dual challenge: improving customer service while increasing delivery efficiency. Through an internal business case this firm had identified a pipeline of use cases that were ripe for making use of the new wave of Agentic solutions to improve internal processes – delivering outcomes faster and more efficiently.
With strong data foundations in place, the firm identified a key opportunity to enhance the delivery of lease audits – comprehensive reviews of lease documents and expenses designed to ensure compliance and validate charges.
Disparate scanned documents and manual processes
During a lease audit, clients provide a series of documents relating to their leases and expenses. These documents can be in a range of formats and structures from scanned lease agreements through to transactions and calculations made in Excel.
This range, diversity and volume of documents introduces several challenges including time-consuming manual reviews of documentation, application of complex IFRS/AASB standards, and a lack of standardised processes.
These challenges introduced risks of miscalculation, increased manual effort for audit teams, constrained scalability, and affected both the speed and quality of customer outcomes.
Transforming Lease Auditing with Agentic AI
The firm engaged One51 to develop a Proof of Concept (PoC) for a “Lease Auditing Agent” – a multi-agent AI-driven solution designed to automate lease audits by extracting data from client documents, validating calculations and disclosures, and generating audit reports; with full traceability and human review for exceptions.
Built on the firm’s modern cloud-based data platform, the four-week PoC delivered:
End-to-End Document Processing
Documents could be uploaded and tracked through a user interface covering extraction, calculation, validation, and reporting.
Automated Lease Data Extraction
OCR and intelligent agents classify documents and extract key lease terms and payments.
Standards-Driven Calculations
Rules-based agents apply IFRS / AASB 16 to generate lease calculations.
Validation & Exception Detection
Multi-agent checks validate results, detect exceptions, and flag inconsistencies.
Traceable Audit & Compliance
Document audit trail covering inputs, agent decisions, calculations, and validations.
Calculations & Reporting
Automatically produces workbooks, variance analysis, and audit-ready reports.
Intelligent Knowledge & Search Layer
Vector search over standards and client data supports agent reasoning and reconciliation.
This PoC provided significant benefits including:
Time & Cost Savings
Agents automate ingestion, extraction, and validation, reducing manual effort and shortening audit cycles.
Scalable Efficiency
Processing of large lease portfolios, using rule and pattern-based agents, enabling fast turnaround across multiple clients without added staff or loss of accuracy, utilising the elastic scalability of the cloud-based data platform.
Audit Quality
The agent cross-references calculated results against financial disclosures and internal policies, flags issues, and maintains a complete audit trail -enhancing accuracy, regulatory compliance, and client confidence.
Error Reduction
Reduces manual errors and ensures standards adherence.
"Our four week PoC demonstrated instant commercial impact, cutting manual effort and improving consistency across lease audits from day one. With a scalable, enterprise ready design already in place, the firm is now positioned to expand rapidly across new document types and international accounting frameworks."
Peter Hopwood
Director of Consulting Services, One51 Consulting
Validating value and scaling for production
The PoC showed how agentic automation could streamline lease auditing in just four weeks. The immediate focus shifted to quantifying time and effort savings to support a business case for full-scale deployment.
The production solution would extend coverage to additional document types and international accounting standards, while scaling and hardening the platform for global, enterprise use.
