About · The CPA Advantage
Twenty-five years
inside the numbers.
Trent Bendick, CPA. Alberta-based. Alberta-built. Alberta-focused.
Twenty-five years in accounting, most of it in Alberta construction. Project accountant, lead accountant, field accounting manager, assistant controller. Major industrial contracts, large unionized workforces, and accounting and timekeeping teams of my own.
Somewhere along the way I stopped waiting for the ERP to do what the project needed. I've pulled data out of systems that didn't want to give it up, bridged client systems into payroll, and built the reporting decision-makers actually use. Every one of them started the same way: the data existed, the system wouldn't surface it, and someone in the office was rebuilding it by hand in Excel.
I built StrategicSystems because I got tired of watching good companies lose money to bad plumbing. The data is there. The field guys know what's happening. The office knows what the contract says. The problem is that nothing connects - and the solutions on the market are either too rigid, too expensive, or too generic to care about the way things actually work in Alberta.
I help business owners take back control of their operations, I reduce friction between the Field and the Office, the results are efficient processes, and accurate reporting.
The CPA Advantage
Three things no generic vendor can match.
Direct ERP fluency
Viewpoint, JD Edwards, Track, and the reporting layers around them. I know what the tables look like underneath, how the data flows, and where it stalls. When the built-in reporting won't stretch, I connect the ERP to the tools that will.
Alberta-specific logic
Union agreements, LEM reporting, LOA, camp and travel logistics, gate-swipe reconciliation, cross-border PST on assets. None of it ships out of the box with off-the-shelf software. All of it I have built before, on live projects, under deadline.
CPA-grade financial rigor
Month-end close, reconciliations, WIP valuation, revenue recognition on major contracts. Budgets and work breakdown structures set up so internal estimates and client reporting reconcile. Every system I build is designed by someone who has to close the month with it.
"You have a good ERP system, it just needs a customized touch to match your business. I build the field-ready User Interface your crews will actually use - and I make sure the data flows clean into the backend you already paid for."
Let's talk about your system.
Start with a Free Systems Audit, or book a call and I'll walk through what's leaking.