Get To Know Us

Why finance & budget departments hire our firm

We leave nothing to chance.

For nearly 30 years, we have enabled public sector finance and budget departments across North America to improve and automate their most time-consuming, monotonous, and dreaded business processes.

Our carefully selected team of professionals begins by interviewing your team and reviewing your current processes. We then collaborate with your team to redesign those processes—selecting, implementing, and supporting the optimal enabling technology to meet your distinct needs.

Core competencies:

  • Accounting expertise:
    • Our lead consultants are all CPAs, with extensive accounting experience.
    • We have tackled reporting projects in nearly every major reporting framework in North America, including GASB, PSAB, IFRS, GAAP, and ASPE. 
    • Every one of our consultants has conducted audits, prepared the working papers and year-end financial statements for audits, and/or prepared budgets and budget books. Many of our consultants have done ALL of these tasks. 
  • Technology expertise:
    • From performing business process analysis to building custom applications, from designing and implementing radio frequency wide-area networks that cover multiple city blocks to building custom web applications that present annual tender awards, our professionals have a breadth and depth of experience that is hard to match.
    • We continually investigate and review current and evolving technology solutions to identify best-of-breed tools.
    • We are certified to implement, train, and support numerous solutions for finance departments. 
  • Domain expertise:
    • We have more than 200 years of collective experience working both in and with finance and budget departments in government, education, and corporations across North America. This gives our team a broad perspective and deep understanding of finance processes and language.
    • Those decades of experience allow our team to immediately step in, understand your issues with a minimal learning curve, and begin assisting your finance department.
    • We are regular presenters for numerous professional associations across North America on business process improvement, financial reporting, internal controls, communication, and data analytics and monitoring.

Enabling competencies:

  • Project management:
    • We work with each of our clients to carefully and formally map out each step in the project, assign responsibilities, establish and track deadlines and develop fallback plans.  We share these plans with our clients so they can participate and continuously monitor progress towards their goals. Our clients always know the status of each task and the project as a whole.
  • Communication:
    • From automated updates from our project management and support systems, to recording and sharing all of our meetings, we focus on ensuring clear, concise, and regular communication. 
  • Client care:
    • Your problems become our problems. Prioritizing client satisfaction is the focus of every member of our team. Our clients rave about their experiences working with FHB.

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Our Story

We trace our roots back nearly 70 years to a traditional accounting firm. We've evolved and today are recognized as a foremost authority on finance and budget department improvement and automation.

How we evolved is a somewhat interesting story.

In the late 90s, we began to see a trend; finance professionals struggled to keep up with the demands being placed on them.  When we interviewed finance teams we heard that either:

1) They had not found the best solutions to enable efficiency gains, or

2) They had purchased software, but were not seeing its benefits. 

We investigated with numerous clients to understand why this occurred and found the following... Read More

In short, we determined that often finance teams did not have necessary expertise in three key areas and universally lacked time to ensure they received maximum value from their IT solution.

We took these observations and assembled our team to bridge the gap between finance and technology. We implement, integrate, and optimize industry-leading tools and best practices to evolve our clients' finance functions.

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Grandpa Black's firm, F.H. Black & Company Chartered Accountants was formed in 1950 with offices in Fort William and Port Arthur, Ontario as well as Winnipeg, Manitoba.

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Harry Black (grandson) founds F.H. Black & Associates, specializing in assisting finance departments to understand the complexities of the newly-implemented Goods & Services Tax (GST)

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Jamie Black joins his brother Harry. The firm formally changes name to F.H. Black & Company and reinstitutes Grandpa's firm's style & brand. The focus of the firm is traditional accounting, bookkeeping & tax.

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Already focussing on improving finance department efficiency, the firm reviews and selects CaseWare Working Papers as the best solution for automating complex, standardized reporting tasks.

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By 2000 the firm has grown. Our team has expanded and we have begun rendering a full range of services to finance departments including systems needs analysis, ERP implementation, custom application development, training and support.

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FHB partners with Tableau Software to enable our finance department clients to perform ad-hoc analysis and create dashboards, to more effectively understand and communicate complex business insights.

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To better service clients in numerous time zones, as well as attract and retain the best talent, FHB implements full remote-work policy enabling complete flexibility to live and work where it best suits the individual.

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To focus entirely on finance department improvement, Jamie & Harry found F.H. Black & Company Incorporated. The accounting firm continues to provide traditional accounting services to small and medium size businesses.

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F.H. Black & Company Incorporated partners with Questica Budget to develop a one-click integration with CaseWare Working Papers and provide an automated GFOA Distinguished Budget Book award-compliant solution for their users.

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CLIENTS

700+
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SUCCESSFUL ENGAGEMENTS

1,000+
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COMBINED YEARS OF EXPERIENCE

300+

Our Experts

Alexandra Kim

Technical Consultant

Amy Manthey, CPA, CITP, CISA

Principal Consultant

Christine Gilbert, CPA, CA

Principal Consultant

Christopher Buurman

Technical Consultant

Claudia Galindo

Technical Consultant

Darryl Parker, CPA, CMA

Director, Solutions Design & Architecture

Doug Atkinson

Director, Partnerships & Alliances

Dustin Ide

Solutions Advisor, Finance & Budget

Ed McCaulley, CPA, MBA

Principal Consultant

Faith Olanipekun, CPA

Principal Consultant

Hafiz Khan

Solutions Advisor, Finance & Budget

Harry Black, FCPA,FCMA

Vice President

James Goligher

Mgr. Marketing

Jamie Black

President

Jan Brewer, CPA, CGMA, MBA

Principal Consultant

Jessica Sprute

Technical Consultant

Jill Moats, CPA

Principal Consultant

Joe Gravel

Sr. Graphic Designer

Joy Richardson, CPA

Principal Consultant

Kathy Drumm

Mgr. Human Resources, Performance & Development

Kelsey Macke, PMP

Project Manager

Kira Johnson

Senior Copywriter

Lauren Reney

Project Manager

Logan Brown

Technical Consultant

Maggie Hess

Technical Consultant

Mariska du Preez

Finance

Megan Soles, CPA, CA, CIA

Principal Consultant

Michael Flavin

Solutions Advisor, Finance & Budget

Michael Hawley

Solutions Advisor, Finance & Budget

Michael Spurlin

Technical Consultant

Michael Switzer, CPA, CA

Principal Consultant

Michelle Richardson

Manager, Professional Development

Myra Rogers

Technical Consultant

Paula Anselmo

Technical Consultant, Design Specialist

Rachel Raymond

Client Services Manager

Sarah Yackobeck

Recruitment Specialist

Todd Coulombe

Client Success Manager

Tricia Fraser, CPA, CA

Director of Operations

Waldo Nell

Mgr. Development

What Our Clients Say