Senior Controller and Fractional CFO at Kruze Consulting, training the accounting team that manages the books for venture-backed startups from Pre-Seed through Series C.
Who is Jennifer Mattingly?
Jennifer Mattingly has 28 years in accounting and 4 at Kruze Consulting, where she trains new hires into client-ready controllers and maintains the onboarding standards that turn venture-backed startups’ informal, scattered financial records into a Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) compliant monthly close. Her focus is accrual accounting, equity accounting, and revenue recognition, the areas where early-stage companies most often stumble and where investors look hardest.
Credentials and Education
- Master of Business Administration, Accounting, Bellarmine University
- Certified Fractional CFO, issued by Kruze Consulting (2025)
- E-Learning Instructional Design Certificate, Association for Talent Development (ATD), 2026
Experience
I train Kruze Consulting’s incoming accountants to become assistant controllers and controllers who can own client-facing work, drawing on years I spent doing that work directly. Getting a new hire to controller-level judgment is not a matter of handing over a checklist. It means teaching them how a startup’s business model, payroll setup, revenue streams, spending patterns, equity activity, and banking structure all feed into a clean close, and how to spot the difference between a record that is merely missing and one that creates a real accounting or reporting risk.
What I teach my team stems from years of experience doing this work across many startups. In one engagement, a fast-growing startup had information spread across multiple systems, inconsistent historical records, and no clear ownership of workflows like expense approvals, payroll coding, revenue support, and bank reconciliations. The company needed reliable reporting for leadership decisions and investor expectations, and it needed a clean handoff to the team that would run its ongoing monthly close. I assessed the company’s accounting systems and operational risks, mapped the systems and integrations, identified the gaps that could distort the opening balance sheet or the close, and translated them into clear ownership, timelines, and client requests. I also built handoff documentation that gave the receiving team the company’s processes, open questions, critical accounts, and risks, not just a status report. The result was a controlled transition from fragmented operations into a repeatable close, with clearer client expectations and far fewer last-minute scrambles. Replicating this requires judgment about GAAP implications, close dependencies, and the operational reality of fast-moving startups.
In my time at Kruze, I have seen many founders attempting to launch a product before the accounting backbone is in place to support it. My role is to give them the guidance they need and expert direction delivered with respect for how sharp these founders already are.
Areas of Expertise
- Accrual-based accounting for early-stage startups
- GAAP compliance for venture-backed companies
- Equity accounting and related startup compliance factors
- Revenue accounting and recognition for startups
- Standardized accounting onboarding for companies with immature or inconsistent financial operations
- Controller and assistant-controller training and development
When financial operations develop informally during fast growth, the gaps tend to surface during diligence. Book a call to talk through where your financials stand.