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finance transformation

30 Years of Office of Finance Excellence—And We’re Just Getting Started

June 23, 2025 by Revelwood

In 1995 two colleagues sat down and imagined a different kind of consulting firm—one laser-focused on helping Finance teams plan, analyze and make better decisions. That conversation between Ken Wolf and Dan Bernatchez, sparked by disillusionment with the status quo and energized by a growing market opportunity, gave rise to Revelwood.

Thirty years later, we’re celebrating a milestone that reflects not just our longevity, but our continuous reinvention, our commitment to our clients and our passion for the Office of Finance.

The Origin Story: A Vision for Something Better

Revelwood wasn’t born in a boardroom. It was born from experience. At the time, Ken and Dan were consultants working with TM1 technology (then owned by Sinper Corporation) long before it became part of IBM Planning Analytics. They believed there was a smarter way to serve clients: by specializing, simplifying and staying true to core values.

They took a leap and founded Revelwood, choosing focus over breadth and deep expertise over being generalists. From day one, the goal was clear: build a firm that speaks the language of business and empowers Finance teams to lead with insight. Soon after Revelwood was established, Rob Gordy joined the partner team to strengthen the firm’s technical expertise and capabilities.

The Evolution: Staying True While Growing Smart

Revelwood’s early days were grounded in financial planning and analysis—what we now call FP&A. Over the years, we’ve embraced new technologies, added vendor partnerships and responded to tectonic shifts in the software landscape. We weathered transitions—from TM1’s move to from Sinper, to Applix, to Cognos and then to IBM.

Throughout the years we have made a conscious decision to focus on what made us successful: deep domain expertise in the Office of Finance. That decision led to new partnerships with Workday and BlackLine, positioning Revelwood as a multi-solution partner offering best-in-class tools for FP&A and financial close.

Internally, we evolved from a small consultancy to a scalable, growth-oriented company. Today, we have an international presence, a dedicated sales and marketing engine and a client success team — all built to serve our clients better and more efficiently.

What Sets Us Apart: Our Not-So-Secret Sauce

Revelwood is truly unique. Our “secret sauce” isn’t one thing—it’s a blend of:

  • Our core values: These shape our culture and are reflected in every decision and interaction, no matter how large or small. They are:
    • Be passionate.
    • It’s about the team.
    • Do the right thing.
    • Take pride in your work.
    • Take initiative.
    • We care.
  • Our people: We hire smart finance and accounting professionals, then layer in technology skills —resulting in real-world solutions that work.
  • Our brand promise: We speak business first. We deliver useware, not shelfware. And we’ve always got your back.
  • Our focus: We’re not trying to be everything to everyone. We know the Office of Finance and we live in that world every day.
  • Our growth mindset: While many firms stay small, we’ve invested in scale, structure and strategy. That’s helped us build lasting client relationships and earn accolades from partners like BlackLine, IBM and Workday.

The Road Ahead: Finance Transformation, End to End

As we look forward, the next phase of Revelwood’s journey is all about expanding our role in finance transformation. We will soon be launching our Workday Financials practice — complementing our long-standing expertise in planning, analytics, and financial close automation.

The goal? To support the entire Office of Finance with a full suite of integrated tools—from record to report, from plan to performance. Whether it’s IBM Planning Analytics, Workday Adaptive Planning, BlackLine or Workday Financials, Revelwood is uniquely positioned to guide organizations through end-to-end financial transformation.

Here’s to the Next 30

For 30 years, Revelwood has been in your corner — helping you navigate change, accelerate performance, and lead with confidence. We’re grateful to the clients, partners and teammates who’ve made this journey possible.

And we’re just getting started.

We’ve got your back—for the next 30 years and beyond.

Home » finance transformation

Filed Under: News & Events Tagged With: finance transformation, Financial Performance Management, Office of Finance, Revelwood, Workday Adaptive Planning

Modern Accounting: Achieving Finance Transformation

May 26, 2022 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

This is a guest blog post from our partner BlackLine, explaining four essential steps for transformation success.

Making the Move to F&A Digital Transformation

For controllers, CFOs, CTOs, and business leaders in general, planning a move to digital finance transformation can be daunting—and it can raise some serious concerns. What if, for example, the transformation causes more problems than it solves in the intermediate term? What if it adds interim state technical complexities to an already challenging ecosystem further challenging the partnership between finance and IT?

Mike Polaha, BlackLine senior vice president finance solutions and technology, has seen these and other issues arise in his time working with global organizations. Digital transformation has been proven to deliver significant benefits, he notes, but the keys to success are in the preparation and being smart with the ways you organize and sequence the strategy and work plans.

4 Steps to Finance Transformation While Avoiding Common Pitfalls

Base Your Strategy on Diagnostics

Your strategy and corresponding business case should have a clear goal, and that goal should be informed by benchmarks of similar companies in the affected finance processes.

“You don’t want your strategy to be informed by hunches,” says Polaha. Instead, it’s good to use an outside consulting group—the Hackett Group, for example, or some other company with a benchmarking service—to see where you currently stand, then focus your strategy to gain the greatest competitive advantage at maximum efficiency.

Benchmarking can also be critical in selling the transformation to executive management.

“It can help you show executive leaders how, by making certain investments, you can not only improve your cost to serve, but likewise how the service can be differentiated in what it can now provide,” he says. “You’re more finitely tethering the functional investment to the overall business strategies.”

Adopt a Leading-Practice Orientation

Polaha notes, “every company is unique, of course, but all companies share certain fundamental characteristics. Once a company realizes this, it’s able to benefit by looking at, and emulating, industry leading practices.”

 Here is where a relationship with a top-end system integrator like Deloitte or EY can pay dividends.

“These companies have lots of experience with finance transformation,” he says. “They can show you a well-documented way of adopting best-practice processes for your specific areas of concentration.

“Also, BlackLine can help implement leading practice solutions based on our own experiences with customer installations and our regular participation in customer advisory boards. In essence, our application is crowdsourced by enabling best practice inherent in the composition of our solution design.”

Admit You’re Not a Software Company & Embrace the Cloud

According to Polaha, “too many companies think that they can develop their own applications. The problem is they first have to build the applications, and then they have to maintain and upgrade them. Then typically at some point they start to fall behind and can’t catch up.”

An example is one company that tried to upgrade their intercompany reconciliations by customizing their ERP software. “It then became very difficult, and costly, for them to implement vendor upgrades without the fear of breaking everything they’d developed.”

Using the cloud can help speed application deployments and allow companies to digitize rapidly at scale. The company also avails itself to a future proof architecture by allowing the SaaS provider to continually embed the latest evolutions in process and solution capability.

Polaha notes, “there are times when companies have too many applications with significant overlap. It’s better to partner with fewer vendors that can use the cloud to cover multiple applications.

“If you’re using one finance vendor for account reconciliations and another to do cash application for accounts receivable, it’s much more efficient to give those jobs to a single, cloud-based vendor to simplify the overall technological and contractual footprint.”

Harmonize Finance Data with the Enterprise

Here’s where finance can be an evangelist and a valuable partner to IT.

Data analytics are growing in popularity as a tool for business planning, but Polaha notes that analytics are only effective when they’re based on data that’s harmonized—unified—so that all data uses common, standardized naming and formatting conventions.

As an example, today’s finance groups are making increasing use of analytics-driven rolling forecasts that produce continuous predictions based on the previous time period’s data. Rolling forecasts can be very effective planning tools, says Polaha, but only if they are based on harmonized data.

“The problem is that without harmonized data, some people will be basing their planning instances on their unique views of the data. So, you end up with 50 instances of planning and forecasting software, and you can’t put Humpy Dumpty back together again.”

Once finance has harmonized its own data, it can then become an evangelist for data harmonization across the enterprise.

“Finance can then present a common view of finance data to IT,” says Polaha. “IT can use that for further harmonizing their own data and applications,” he says.

“That’s the ultimate prize for transformation, isn’t it? To get finance, IT, and the entire enterprise moving smoothly into a digital future.”

Home » finance transformation

Filed Under: Financial Close & Consolidation Tagged With: BlackLine, enterprise performance management, finance transformation, Financial Performance Management, FP&A, modern accounting, modern FP&A, Revelwood + BlackLine

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