— THE PROBLEM
A process built for a smaller company.
Pattison Agriculture is one of North America’s largest John Deere dealer groups, managing 21 million acres of agricultural production across approximately 950 employees and multiple business units within the Jim Pattison Group. Their leased asset base covers fleet vehicles, service trucks, forklifts, and specialized equipment, each tracked under separate GL codes with distinct accounting requirements.
For years, that tracking happened in Excel. As Pattison scaled past 900 employees and continued adding equipment at an accelerating pace, the cracks widened: formulas broke, errors surfaced on review, and every month the accounting team worked through more than 1,000 lines of journal entries, entering figures by hand.
“We were finding we were making errors. As we got bigger and kept adding more equipment at faster and faster rates, it just became unmanageable.”
Ethan Zimmer, CPA — Controller, Pattison Agriculture
— WHY BLACK OWL
Built for complexity, not around it.
A recommendation from another Jim Pattison Group company pointed the team toward Black Owl. A demo confirmed the fit.
What followed was not a straightforward implementation. Pattison’s auditors required a depreciation methodology that differed from what most lease accounting systems are designed to handle. Rather than asking the team to work around it, Black Owl built a custom formula directly into Pattison’s report template — calculating the adjusted asset life value so that depreciation hits the residual exactly at lease end. It was tested across multiple scenarios before going anywhere near production.
“The key services that were really value-added for us were especially that implementation support and getting those additional measures to match our intricacies and unique complexities.”
Ethan Zimmer, CPA — Controller, Pattison Agriculture
— THE RESULT
The close without the chaos.
1,000+
monthly journal entry lines eliminated. Asset classes with different GL codes now flow through the system accurately, without manual intervention.
Since going live in April, the 1,000-line monthly journal entry process is gone. Asset classes with different GL codes flow through the system accurately, without manual intervention. When a future ERP change comes, the flexibility of Black Owl means the transition won’t mean rebuilding lease portfolio data and resulting spreadsheet logic from scratch.
For a company managing the scale and complexity of Pattison Agriculture, the risk process was becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. Today, the finance team has a structured lease accounting process that is easier to manage, better aligned with auditor requirements, and built to support continued growth.
