A wave of significant accounting standard setting has created heavy compliance burdens that many company finance departments are struggling to handle.

Just 37% of more than 140 companies surveyed by KPMG LLP said they are on the right track in their implementation of the new revenue recognition standard issued by FASB and the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), which takes effect at the beginning of 2018 for public companies.

Meanwhile, new lease accounting requirements have companies attempting a challenging process of locating all their lease agreements and extracting data points from them that haven’t been necessary for accounting in the past.

This is a challenge because more than two-thirds (68%) of companies surveyed by PwC and commercial real estate services and investment firm CBRE have used spreadsheets as their primary system for tracking leases, and 84% currently abstract key terms from their lease agreements manually.

Finally, financial institutions in particular are affected by separate new standards issued by the IASB and FASB that require replacing the current incurred-loss models with expected-loss accounting for financial instruments. It’s one of the most significant rules changes in financial institution accounting in years.

“It’s a lot of work for what oftentimes are lean financial reporting groups to adopt three potentially heavily impactful standards,” said Sheri Wyatt, CPA, partner for capital markets and accounting advisory services at PwC.

The problem starts with revenue recognition, as many companies are behind schedule despite a one-year delay in the effective date that FASB and the IASB announced last year. Seventy-one percent of the KPMG survey respondents are only at the point where they are assessing the accounting impacts of the standard, and an additional 8% haven’t even begun implementation.

This is a concern because almost half of respondents say they will need systems changes—which could be time-consuming. Thirty-seven percent will be implementing changes to existing systems, and 13% will be implementing a new software solution for revenue recognition.

Respondents in the KPMG survey who are not on track in their implementation said they have other competing priorities, are constrained by human resources, or are lacking financial resources.

“Number one, they’re trying to run a business,” said Dean Bell, CPA, KPMG LLP’s advisory leasing leader. “And you have the annual reporting period and the quarterly reporting periods. Then you’re talking about the various initiatives around these accounting standards that are out there. Beyond that, you have a significant number of updates to do with technology. So I think that companies and their leaders are probably somewhat overwhelmed right now.”

Here are six tips that experts say can help ease the burden of these multiple implementations:

Focus on first things first. Revenue recognition is the standard whose implementation date is coming up first, and for many companies, it may be the most challenging of the three standards to implement.

“With revenue recognition, companies shouldn’t lose focus on the fact that that’s going to be effective fairly soon,” Wyatt said. “… I do think that companies that have been heavily impacted by revenue recognition may not be moving as quickly with respect to leasing because they’re trying to obviously finalize their revenue recognition approach and adoption of the new standard.”

If revenue recognition is a challenge, companies may want to work on the accounting assessment for that standard first before turning over work on systems design and changes to others in the organization, said Stephen Thompson, CPA, KPMG LLP’s revenue recognition advisory leader.

“Then a company could pivot their accounting focus to leasing and work through that,” Thompson said. “Would that mean having to do them consecutively rather than at the same time like some companies might desire? Maybe. But that may be the reality of it for some companies.”

Finish your revenue recognition assessment. The majority (71%) of companies in KPMG’s survey are conducting their assessment of accounting impacts.

This is a process that Thompson said should involve finance as well as process-focused and IT-focused personnel so that a company can come to a conclusion collectively on what changes need to be made to systems and processes.

In the next three to six months, Thompson said, companies need to finish that process of collecting the information they need to design the changes they need to their systems and processes. That would give them at least 12 months to design and implement those systems and processes.

Bring tax to the table. Just 29% of companies in the KPMG survey said their tax professionals were at least moderately involved in the assessment stage of their revenue recognition implementation.

Those who are not involving tax may be making a mistake, because the new revenue recognition rules may affect existing tax-compliance processes, taxable income, accounting for income taxes, tax accounting method changes, and other areas of tax, including transfer pricing, according to KPMG.

“For some companies, tax may not be an impact,” Thompson said. “But for companies where there will be a change in the accounting, then tax absolutely should be at the table for obvious reasons.”

Many companies do expect the new lease accounting rules to have a tax impact. Sixty-four percent of companies in the KPMG survey expect the new leases standard to have at least a moderate impact on tax reporting.

Examine your current lease structure. Seventy percent of more than 500 executives responsible for lease accounting or lease management have either started implementation of the new standard or plan to start this year, according to the survey by PwC and CBRE.

As companies begin their lease accounting implementation, they need to start developing a project plan, Wyatt said.

“Part of that project plan is understanding what your current lease [environment] is,” Wyatt said. “So do I have one centralized spreadsheet or system, or do I have subsidiaries that may maintain multiple [systems] that I then have to aggregate? What’s the level of data in the system? So I think that’s the initial step.”