03The firm
KNA Group runs finance operations.
The firm was founded by Khaled Hawari and he runs the engagements himself. Not advice, not a report on what is wrong, and not a template pack: a function, with an owner, a calendar and an output, for incorporated Canadian companies of roughly ten to seventy-five people.
01Who runs the firm
Khaled Hawari, founder and principal.
First rather than last, because at this size the honest answer to who does the work is one name, and a firm that will not give it is describing a different kind of company.
KNA Group exists because of a specific and fairly narrow piece of experience. Khaled Hawari spent two years as a corporate finance analyst at Harris Computer Systems, where the reporting calendar had to keep working while the company kept acquiring others. An acquired business unit turns up with its own chart of accounts, its own revenue contracts and its own idea of when a month ends, and somebody has to make all of them report on the same day. He carried IFRS 15 and IFRS 16 into those entities and unified their charts of accounts.
Behind that sit roughly eight years in Ottawa practice and on his own account: full-cycle books, corporate and personal returns, and assurance-support work, which is the discipline of leaving a working paper file a stranger can follow without asking a question. He works day to day in CaseWare and ProFile, holds commerce degrees from the University of Ottawa and Carleton University, works in English, French and Arabic, and is based in Ottawa.
Practically, that means the assessment and the rebuild are done by him rather than handed to a junior. There is no account manager between you and the person reading your ledger, and the scope is written to a size one experienced person can genuinely run.
02Principles
Four things every engagement holds to.
They are here because each one is a decision a client can hold the firm to, rather than a value nobody can be wrong about.
01A date, not an estimate
Every engagement carries a calendar with real dates on it. A close that is done when it is done is not a close, it is a backlog, and a reporting pack with no committed arrival date will be late in the month it matters most.
02Your systems, not ours
The work is built inside the ledger, the bank and the tools the company already pays for. Nothing here depends on a proprietary template or a spreadsheet that leaves when the engagement does.
03Documented while it is built
A process written up afterwards is a description of what somebody remembers doing. Documentation is produced as each step is put in place, which is the only version that is accurate and the only version a successor can follow.
04Scoped before it starts
The scope names what is included, what is not, who supplies what, and on what date. An engagement that begins without that document ends in a disagreement about which half of the work was implied.
03First ninety days
What actually happens after signing.
Written out so the first month is not a surprise. Most of it is reading, and that is the part clients most often want to skip.
- Days 1 to 30
- Read three closes end to end. Produce the written assessment: what is broken, where it breaks, and what it costs in time and in reopened periods.
- Days 31 to 60
- Rebuild the close calendar, the reconciliation set and the approval thresholds. Document each one as it goes in. Agree the reporting pack contents with whoever reads it.
- Days 61 to 90
- Run a full period on the new calendar with the old one available as a fallback. The pack ships on the agreed date. Any step that needed a heroic effort gets rebuilt before the next period.
- After that
- The function runs on the calendar. Scope is reviewed each quarter, because a company of forty does not need what a company of fifteen needed.
04Boundaries
What we do not do.
A firm that draws a line reads as more credible, not less, and it saves an enquiry that was never going to fit.
This is a corporate engagement. We do not prepare personal returns and we are not a tax advice service for individuals. Khaled Hawari runs a separate practice for that work atkhaledhawari.ca, which is engaged separately and billed separately from this firm.
The scoping conversation is short.
An hour with Khaled Hawari, the last three closes, and whoever currently touches the ledger. It ends with a written scope or a straight answer that this is not the right engagement.