About KMB Financial

Korissa Bastianelli, President

Since 2023 Korissa has run the finance and operations side of a Rhode Island real estate brokerage as its Finance Director — accounting, budgeting, and financial reporting, agent commissions, escrow and transaction accounting, payroll coordination, vendor management, and the day-to-day office operations underneath all of it.

That is the whole reason brokerages are the specialty here. The commission disbursement schedule, the per-agent split and cap tracking, the escrow account reconciled apart from operating, the January stack of agent 1099s — this is a description of her actual job, not a service line adapted from a general bookkeeping package.

Before the brokerage she spent six years at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Rhode Island, the last four as a claims adjuster: reviewing medical billing, checking claims against plan terms, investigating discrepancies, and resolving them with providers and members. It is not bookkeeping, but it is the same underlying discipline — reconcile what was billed against what is actually owed, find the difference rather than write it off, and document it well enough to survive review.

KMB Financial exists because the work she does for one brokerage is work most small businesses need and few can justify hiring for. A business with enough going on to have complicated books is rarely big enough to employ someone who understands them — so the books get done late, done badly, or done by the owner at the kitchen table on a Sunday.

The other reason is simpler: she likes this work. Every business keeps its books somewhere different, and figuring out how an unfamiliar system thinks is the part she would do anyway — which is also why changing your software is never a condition of working together. And getting an owner to the point where their own numbers make sense to them is, to her, the job itself rather than a courtesy attached to it.

Tom Bastianelli, Vice President

Tom leads the technical side of the practice: the automation and integration work that sits on top of a bookkeeping engagement — connecting to the accounting system a client already runs, taking the repetitive parts of the monthly cycle off a person's desk, and building the small internal tools a business keeps needing.

That work is scoped and priced as its own project rather than folded into the monthly retainer, and it never changes who is answerable for the books. Automation changes how long the work takes; Korissa still signs off on what becomes the record.

Tom founded Signal Solutions in 2016 — an IT and telecommunications firm in Warwick that has spent a decade looking after Rhode Island businesses: managed IT, cybersecurity, network and cloud work, telecom, and the automation and integration work that grew out of it. Law firms, accounting practices, and clubs are among the industries it serves, which is much the same ground KMB Financial covers.

That is where the automation capability comes from, and it is why it is approached the way it is. Ten years of managed IT and security work does not leave you keen to connect a system of record to something experimental — it leaves you asking what happens when it fails, who can switch it off, and where the data actually sits.

The automation work is built and contracted through Signal Solutions rather than folded into a bookkeeping retainer, so the technical engagement stands on its own — its own scope, its own price, its own agreement.

How the practice works

KMB Financial has two officers, but the bookkeeping itself is deliberately done by one person rather than a team. That has consequences worth stating plainly, because they cut both ways.

• You get the same person every month. No account manager, no handoff to junior staff, no re-explaining your business to someone new in March.
• Separation of duties. Independent record-keeping separates collection, deposit, and recording — a basic internal control most small businesses lack, because the same person does all three.
• Questions get answered during the month, by phone or email, rather than saved for a quarterly review.
• The work runs in the system you already have — a brokerage back-office platform such as Lone Wolf, QuickBooks Online, or whatever your office already runs. Changing software is never a condition of working together.
• Engagements are a flat monthly retainer, quoted after looking at your books, so there is no meter running when you pick up the phone.
• There is a limit to how many clients one person can carry properly. When the calendar is full, the honest answer is a waiting list rather than a worse service.
• Automation work is scoped separately from the monthly bookkeeping — a distinct project with its own price, run by Tom, that leaves responsibility for the books where it is.

What KMB Financial is not

Worth being direct about, because the distinction saves everyone time:

• Not a CPA firm. No income tax returns, no tax planning, no audits or reviewed financial statements, no representing you before the IRS. Those need a CPA — see bookkeeper vs. CPA for which questions go where.
• Not a law firm. Worker classification, entity structure, and trust account compliance are questions for your attorney.
• Not a software reseller. No commission on whatever platform you end up using, and no reason to push you onto one.

What KMB Financial does do is keep the books accurate all year so the professionals above spend their time — and your money — on the work that actually needs their license.

Where

The practice is based in Johnston and works with businesses throughout Rhode Island. The monthly work runs remotely, so where a client sits in the state changes neither the service nor the price.