160 Studios, One Lean Accounting Team

At [solidcore], the accounting team does not have the luxury of specialization. Ian Woodcock, Senior Accountant, Operations & Systems, manages rent payments, tracks variable lease clauses, runs ASC 842 journal entries, and keeps tabs on breakpoint thresholds across a portfolio of 160 and growing studio locations. The team is small by design. The work is not.

When Ian joined, the standard approach was the same one most growing companies fall back on: spreadsheets. Hundreds of tabs. Screenshots of lease clauses embedded in Excel files with formulas running alongside them. A separate Google Sheet for variable rent items. Manual lookups any time a clause needed to be checked. The system worked until the portfolio got big enough that no one person could hold all of it in their head.

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“If you want to ditch all of the Excel sheets and tabs and have one centralized system, Occupier is the way to go.” — Ian Woodcock, [solidcore]

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The Cost of Being Your Own Alert System

The risk of a manual system is not just the time it takes. It is what slips through. With 160 studio leases, each carrying its own rent escalations, CAM reconciliations, real estate tax clauses, and variable rent terms, Ian is responsible for catching every breakpoint before it becomes a financial surprise on a studio’s books.

When a gross sales threshold is exceeded mid-year and no system flags it, the accrual does not happen in real time. Instead of spreading the cost across the months it was actually earned, the full amount lands in a single period. For a studio running tight margins, that kind of lump-sum hit distorts the numbers and creates a cleanup problem that falls entirely on the accounting team to untangle after the fact.

It is the kind of problem that gets harder, not easier, as the portfolio grows. Variable rent terms vary by landlord, by lease, by fiscal year structure. Keeping track of all of them manually is a full-time job inside a job that already has plenty of other demands.

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“I can’t catch every single little thing. If a system, like Occupier, can catch it, we’re never going to miss.”

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ASC 842 Without an Entire Department

Managing ASC 842 compliance across 160 leases is not a small lift. It requires generating journal entries for every location, keeping right-of-use asset and liability schedules current, and ensuring the close process reflects accurate data across the full portfolio. For a lean team, that workload compounds fast.

Occupier handles the journal entry generation directly. The entries get incorporated into the close, and the compliance work gets done without dedicated headcount or outside help. The platform carries what would otherwise require a team of its own.

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“For the amount of [solidcore] studios there are in the country, we would have to have an entire department just for lease accounting if we were not using Occupier.”

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The Platform Is Only Part of the Story

When Ian talks about what makes Occupier work for [solidcore], he does not stop at the software. The relationship with the Occupier team is part of how the work actually gets done. Questions get answered. Issues get resolved. The response time matches the pace his team needs to operate.

For a lean accounting team managing a portfolio this size, that kind of support is not a nice-to-have. When something needs to be updated, changed, or figured out, a slow response has a downstream cost. Ian holds his own team to that same standard, and Occupier has consistently met it.

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“As much as the system is important, it’s also the people who are working the system. If I have a question, or need an update or change, the rapid response time is something I expect and the Occupier team has never disappointed.”

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Built to Scale With the Portfolio

[solidcore] is not standing still. International expansion is in the conversation. New studio formats are being explored. The portfolio that Ian manages today is a fraction of what it could become.

That context shapes how Ian thinks about the tools his team relies on. A system that works for 160 leases needs to still work at 400 or 500, without a proportional increase in the people required to run it. The bar is not just whether a feature solves today’s problem. It is whether the system grows with the business.

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“I’m really just grateful that Occupier is moving with the times. They’re thinking about the pain points for lease accounting teams and coming up with the solutions.”

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For Ian, that forward motion matters as much as what the platform does today. The foundation is there. The next layer is getting built.

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