Khaled Hawari

Khaled Hawari is a tax and financial consultant and a senior technical project manager, and the founder and principal of KNA Group, the Ottawa firm through which he runs the finance function for owner-led incorporated Canadian companies. The engagements sit at one size in particular: businesses of roughly ten to seventy-five people that have outgrown a bookkeeper and cannot yet justify a full-time controller on salary.

What the firm takes on is the function itself, not advice about it. That is the monthly close and the calendar it runs on, the reconciliations and financial controls that keep the numbers standing when a lender or an auditor tests them, the management reporting pack an owner or a board reads each month, and the finance systems that produce all of it. The arrangement is fractional, so the cost tracks the size of the company, and each process is documented as it is built, which is what lets a company absorb the function in-house later rather than depend on him being in the room.

That work rests on a specific piece of experience. For two years Khaled Hawari was a corporate finance analyst at Harris Computer Systems, where the reporting calendar had to keep landing on time while the company kept buying other businesses. Each acquired unit turned up with its own chart of accounts, its own revenue contracts and its own idea of when a month ended, and all of them had to report on the same day. He owned full-cycle accounting through that, carried IFRS 15 and IFRS 16 into the acquired entities, and unified their charts of accounts. Behind it sit roughly eight years in Ottawa practice and on his own account: full-cycle books, corporate and personal returns, and assurance support, the discipline of leaving a working paper file another accountant 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. Alongside KNA Group he runs an independent tax practice at khaledhawari.ca, which is engaged and billed separately from this firm.