F. H. Black & Company Incorporated

We leave nothing to chance.

For over 25 years, we have enabled public sector finance & budget departments across North America to improve and automate their most time consuming, monotonous, and dreaded business processes.

Our carefully selected team of professionals begin by interviewing your team & reviewing your current process. We then collaborate with your team to redesign the process, select, implement, and support the optimal enabling technology.

Core competencies:

Accounting expertise:
- Our lead consultants are all CPAs. In fact, every member of our team has extensive accounting experience.
- We have tackled reporting projects in nearly every major reporting framework in North America including GASB, PSAB, IFRS, GAAP & 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 difficult to duplicate.
- 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 & budget departments in government, education, and corporations across North America. This gives our team a broad perspective and deep understanding of finance's 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, data analytics & monitoring.

Enabling competencies:

Project management:
- Working with our client, we carefully and formally map out each step in the project, assign responsibilities, establish and track deadlines and develop fall-back plans. We share this plan 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. We do not have a failed implementation in our 25-year history and our clients rave about their experience working with our firm.

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 & automation.

How we evolved is a somewhat interesting story.

In the late 90's, we began to see a trend; finance 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 getting little benefit from it for some reason.

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

In short, we determined that often finance did not have the necessary expertise in three key areas and universally lacked the time to dedicate to ensuring 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 & best practices to evolve our client's finance function.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.