Charge a quarterly lease in every month

A lease that pays quarterly used to produce accounting entries only in the months it paid. Two months in three carried no interest and no depreciation at all, which makes a set of management accounts read as though the property were free for eight months of the year. The same applied to half-yearly and annual leases.

Go to Settings, Calculation Methodology and set Monthly Charges to "Every calendar month". Each payment period is then spread across the calendar months it covers, by day count, so a quarter's interest and depreciation are divided between the three months rather than landing in one.

Nothing is re-priced. The liability, the discount rate and the balance at every payment date are exactly as they were, and a full year's totals are identical on either setting. Only the month a charge falls in changes. The rent itself is untouched: cash still leaves on the contractual date.

Every organisation starts with this off, so nothing moves until you choose it. The sensible moment to change it is the start of a period you have not yet posted.

The same release corrects the date on which interest and depreciation are recognised, for everyone, whether or not you use the new setting. They are now dated at the end of the period they accrued over rather than the date the rent was paid. Where a lease period straddled a year end, that had been putting a full period's cost on the wrong side of the cut-off.