A buyer's guide to white-label lease audit software for CPA firms, advisory shops, and boutique auditors. Evaluation criteria, pricing models, and what to avoid.
Offer CAM audit as a service line. White-label CAMAudit under your firm brand.
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Find My OverchargesSee a sample report firstIf your firm has commercial tenant clients, you have already noticed the pattern. Occupancy costs creep up year over year, true-up invoices arrive in the spring, and nobody in the client's organization has the bandwidth to pull the lease and check the math. The work sits there as a known gap. Someone should be reviewing these reconciliations. Nobody is.
White-label lease audit software closes that gap without forcing your firm to build a Common Area Maintenance (CAM) practice from scratch. You get a branded portal, the detection logic, the findings report, and the dispute letter draft workflow, all running under your firm's name. Your client sees your logo and your domain. The forensic engine runs underneath.
This guide is for partners evaluating that category. It covers what white-label actually means in the lease audit context, the evaluation criteria that separate a serious platform from a thin reseller wrapper, the build versus buy math, pricing models you will encounter, and the traps to avoid before you sign an annual commitment.
I built CAMAudit because the forensic comparison between a reconciliation statement and a lease is rule-based work that software does faster and more consistently than a human with a spreadsheet. Firms that partner with us are not outsourcing judgment. They are automating the mechanical comparison so their advisors spend billable hours on client strategy rather than line-item arithmetic.
The term gets used loosely. In the broader SaaS world it can mean anything from a custom logo upload to a fully rebranded infrastructure layer. In the lease audit category specifically, you want to look for four concrete elements.
Branded client-facing portal. The tenant client uploads documents, reviews findings, and pays through a domain and interface that carries your firm's identity. No mention of the underlying vendor in the UI, the emails, or the PDFs the client receives. If your client has to click through a screen that says "Powered by X" before they can see their report, that is co-branding, not white-label.
Branded PDF output. The forensic findings report and the dispute letter draft both need to carry your firm's logo, contact information, and any boilerplate language your practice requires. PDFs are what the client forwards to their attorney, their board, or their landlord. If those documents show the vendor's brand, your partnership is invisible at the moment it matters most.
Partner-controlled pricing. You decide what the client pays. The platform charges your firm a wholesale rate (typically a flat fee per audit or a prepaid bundle), and you set retail pricing based on your market and your advisory positioning. A partner that has no margin control is not a partner. They are a reseller on a fixed commission.
Partner-level data boundaries. Your clients belong to you. The audit records, the findings history, and the contact information should flow into your CRM and your practice management system, not into the vendor's sales funnel. Any partner platform that solicits your clients directly is a competitor in disguise.
A serious white-label lease audit program will satisfy all four. A reseller wrapper will satisfy one or two.
The natural buyer for this category is a firm that already has a book of commercial tenant clients, already reviews lease accounting under ASC 842, and already gets the call when a client's CAM true-up arrives and something looks wrong. That describes CPA firms, boutique advisory shops, fractional CFO practices, cost recovery consultancies, and a segment of litigation support practices adjacent to commercial real estate work.
The fit is strong because the knowledge required to interpret a CAM audit finding is knowledge these firms already have. Operating expense categories, pass-through exclusions, base year mechanics, pro-rata share denominators, controllable expense caps: these are familiar concepts to any CPA who works on commercial tenant engagements. What the firm usually lacks is the tooling to turn that knowledge into a repeatable, scalable service line.
A few signals that a firm is ready to evaluate white-label lease audit software:
If those boxes check, the economics usually work. If they do not, the firm is better off starting with a referral relationship until the client base matures.
Most vendor comparison matrices are padded with marketing features. Here are the criteria that determine whether the platform will hold up under real client workloads.
The core of any lease audit platform is the detection logic. You are looking for coverage across the seven or eight categories where CAM overcharges consistently show up: management fee caps, pro-rata share denominators, excluded service categories, base year calculations, gross-up methodology, CAM caps, controllable expense caps, and estimated payment true-up errors.
A credible platform will publish its detection rules. You should be able to read, in plain language, what each rule tests and how it computes the result. If the vendor will not explain the logic, the rules are either thin or brittle.
Count alone is not the whole story. Ten rules that run deterministic math against extracted lease terms are worth more than thirty rules that produce vague "flags" without dollar amounts. Ask for a sample findings report before you sign. The report should show, for each finding, the specific lease clause, the landlord's charge, the calculated correct charge, and the dollar variance.
The PDF output is the deliverable. It needs to look like your firm produced it.
Evaluate the PDF on three dimensions. First, branding depth: logo, color scheme, footer contact block, cover page, and any custom boilerplate you want inserted. Second, content quality: the findings should read like a professional forensic report, not a machine-generated data dump. Third, the dispute letter draft: a well-structured letter that your client (or their attorney) can edit and send, with tone selection and citations to the relevant lease provisions.
If the vendor only offers a generic PDF with a logo slot, the white-label experience will feel thin to your clients. Push for templates that you can customize per engagement type.
Lease audit platforms typically sell to partners under one of three credit models. Each has different economics and different risk profiles.
Pay-as-you-go. Partner pays a per-audit wholesale fee. No commitment. Flexibility is high, but margins are lower because you cannot negotiate volume pricing. Good for firms testing the service line before scaling.
Prepaid annual bundles. Partner commits to a block of audits (for example, 50 or 100) at a discounted per-unit price, drawn down over twelve months. Margins improve. Cash flow commitment is higher. This is the standard model for firms that have validated demand and want the better unit economics.
Revenue share. Partner pays nothing upfront, and the platform keeps a percentage of each audit fee. This model is easier on cash flow but caps your margin and exposes you to platform decisions about end-client pricing.
The prepaid bundle model is usually the best fit for firms with an established book. You pay for capacity up front, and every audit after the break-even point on client number is pure margin. Make sure the bundle includes clear rollover terms if you do not consume all credits in the contract year.
A white-label service line that does not push client activity into your CRM is operationally broken. When a client completes an audit, your firm needs to know. When a client renews, you need that signal in the same place you track the rest of their advisory relationship.
Look for native integration with the CRM your firm already uses, or an open webhook model that your operations team can wire up. Apollo.io is the common choice for firms running outbound commercial real estate motions. HubSpot and Salesforce are the default for larger practices. If the vendor has no integration story and no webhooks, your team will end up manually re-keying audit events, and the service line will not scale past the first handful of clients.
Most commercial leases include an audit rights clause that specifies how long the tenant has to contest charges after receiving the reconciliation statement. These windows range from 60 days to two years, with 90 days and one year being the most common. Miss the window and the right to dispute is waived.
A serious platform extracts the dispute window from the lease at intake, tracks it per engagement, and alerts your firm when a client's window is closing. Without that feature, your team is tracking deadlines in a spreadsheet, and eventually a client will miss one. The liability of a missed dispute window on a client where you recommended the audit is not a conversation any managing partner wants to have.
At some point a finding will be ambiguous, a lease clause will have unusual language, or a client will push back on a report. You need a human on the vendor side who can answer questions about the detection logic. Evaluate the support SLA and ask for the escalation contact in writing. "Email support" with a 48-hour response window is inadequate for a partner relationship. Chat support with named technical contacts is the baseline.
Firms with engineering budget occasionally consider building in-house. The math almost never works, and the exercise is instructive.
A minimum viable lease audit engine requires: document extraction (lease and reconciliation parsing), a detection rule engine covering the seven or eight common error categories, a PDF generation layer, a dispute letter draft generator, a client portal, payment processing, and ongoing maintenance as lease structures and landlord tactics evolve. Even at a conservative estimate, that scope is a 12-month, multi-engineer build with six-figure annual infrastructure costs.
The break-even analysis looks like this. A white-label partnership at wholesale pricing costs the firm a fixed per-audit fee. At 100 audits per year, the total external cost is roughly the salary of one mid-level engineer for a few months. Building in-house at the same volume costs that engineer for the full year, plus infrastructure, plus the opportunity cost of not shipping anything else during the build.
The break-even point, in audits per year, where in-house development becomes cheaper than a white-label partnership is typically north of 1,000 audits annually. Firms at that scale are rare in the CPA and advisory segment. Cost recovery consultancies with national footprints occasionally reach that volume. For everyone else, build-your-own is a hobby project that competes with client work.
There is also a competitive risk. Your in-house tool is a cost center. The vendor's platform is a product that the vendor invests in full time. The gap between a maintained SaaS platform and an internal tool widens every quarter.
The right question is not "can we build this?" It is "is our differentiation in the detection engine, or in the client relationship?" For almost every firm, the answer is the client relationship. Buy the engine. Invest your effort in the advisory wrapper.
The lease audit software space has not consolidated around a single pricing structure. You will see several models, and understanding them protects you from signing into a structure that does not match your client economics.
Per-audit flat fee (direct-to-tenant). Platforms like CAMAudit charge tenants a flat fee per audit at the consumer tier, usually in the $79 to $299 range for single audits or small packs. This is the benchmark for end-client willingness to pay in the small and mid-market segment.
Enterprise per-engagement fee. Traditional lease audit firms charge $5,000 to $25,000 per engagement, often with a contingency structure on recovered amounts. This model serves large corporate tenants and landlord-adjacent work but is not applicable to most advisory firms entering the space.
Partner wholesale bundles. White-label programs typically price wholesale at 30 to 60 percent of the retail consumer rate, with larger bundles at deeper discounts. A firm paying roughly $40 per audit at wholesale and charging clients $150 as part of an advisory package has a three-to-one margin structure that funds partner operations plus practice overhead.
Subscription with included credits. Some platforms bundle a monthly or annual subscription with a fixed credit allocation. This can work if your practice volume is predictable. If volume is lumpy (common in firms where CAM audits cluster around reconciliation season), a pure pay-as-you-go or prepaid-bundle model is usually more efficient.
Whatever model you evaluate, run the per-engagement math end to end. Include wholesale cost, platform fees, your firm's time on findings review and client advisory, and any external specialist time. Compare that to what the client is willing to pay for the deliverable. If the margin is below 50 percent, the service line will struggle to justify the overhead.
A handful of patterns in vendor pitches should make you pause.
No published detection rules. If the vendor cannot or will not tell you what the engine tests, the engine probably does less than the marketing implies. Real platforms publish their rules.
Contingency-only pricing passed through to clients. Some platforms push a "no recovery, no fee" model to end clients. This works for the largest tenant-side audit firms but poorly fits an advisory firm's business model because it makes revenue recognition unpredictable and puts your firm in the collections business if the client does not follow through.
No dispute letter draft. The findings report without a dispute letter is half the product. Clients who receive a list of findings with no follow-up artifact often do nothing. The dispute letter draft is what moves the engagement from analysis to recovery.
Vendor solicitation of your clients. Read the partner agreement carefully. Any clause that lets the vendor contact clients you brought in, for marketing or upsell purposes, is a red flag. Your book of clients is your book. The platform provides infrastructure. It should not have a sales funnel pointed at your client list.
No SLA on detection engine updates. Lease structures evolve. Landlord tactics shift. Gross-up methodology, management fee structures, and controllable expense definitions all see new wrinkles every few years. If the platform has not published a changelog or a rule update cadence, the engine will age out faster than you expect.
Term commitments longer than 12 months for new partners. A good partnership should prove itself in a year. If the vendor wants three-year commitments before you have run a single engagement together, they are over-indexing on lock-in.
How is white-label lease audit software different from a referral program?
Under a referral program, the client transacts directly with the platform vendor and the partner earns a commission. Under white-label, the client transacts with the partner firm, sees the partner's brand throughout the experience, and the vendor is invisible to the end client. Referral works for firms that want zero operational overhead. White-label works for firms building a branded service line that sits alongside their existing advisory offerings. Details on both models at /partners/white-label and /for-cpas.
Can my firm use white-label software without in-house CAM expertise?
You do not need deep CAM expertise to launch. You do need enough advisory-level understanding to interpret findings for clients, handle pushback, and position the service in your existing engagements. Firms with CPAs who already work on ASC 842 lease accounting or commercial tenant advisory have the foundation. Firms without any commercial tenant exposure should pilot the service with a few existing clients before committing to a bundle.
What is a reasonable first-year audit volume for a mid-sized CPA firm?
A firm with 20 to 50 commercial tenant clients and an active advisory motion typically runs between 30 and 80 audits in the first year. That range covers a mix of annual reconciliation reviews and catch-up audits where the client has multiple prior years to analyze. Volume grows in year two as client word of mouth spreads and the firm includes CAM review in standard engagement scopes.
How do we bill clients for a white-label CAM audit engagement?
Most partner firms bundle the audit into a broader advisory scope rather than billing for the audit alone. A typical structure is a fixed advisory fee that covers lease intake, audit execution, findings review with the client, and dispute letter draft preparation. Some firms add a success-based component tied to recovered amounts, though a pure fixed-fee structure is cleaner and easier to sell. Partner pricing guidance is available at /partners/white-label.
What happens to our clients if we end the partnership?
A well-structured white-label agreement gives the partner firm retention rights over the client relationship. When the partnership ends, clients should not be transitioned to the vendor's direct-to-consumer offering without the partner's consent. Confirm this explicitly in the partner agreement. Any language that lets the vendor contact or market to your former clients after termination is a deal-breaker.
Disclaimer: This article provides general information about evaluating white-label lease audit software for accounting and advisory firms. It is not legal, tax, or accounting advice. Pricing ranges and volume estimates are illustrative and will vary based on vendor, market, and firm profile. Consult qualified counsel and your firm's operations leadership before entering any partner agreement.
