Jerry Connelly - reads your balance sheet so you do not have to.
Profile / Accounting & Advisory
Jerry Connelly
Chief Executive Officer at KeepingCount, where the whole job is one stubborn promise: better numbers for growing businesses.
Most founders did not start a business because they loved bank reconciliations. They started it because they could build a house, brew a beer, write a lease, or ship a product better than the next person. Then the invoices piled up, the books drifted out of date, and the question that keeps owners awake at night arrived right on schedule: do we actually have the money we think we have? Jerry Connelly runs the company that answers that question. As Chief Executive Officer of KeepingCount, he leads a remote-first outsourced accounting and advisory firm whose entire reason for existing fits on a sticky note - better numbers for growing businesses.
It is an unglamorous mission stated plainly, and that plainness is the point. KeepingCount does not promise to disrupt finance or reinvent the ledger. It promises something rarer: that the numbers will be right, on time, and understandable enough to make a decision from. For a small business owner, that is not a feature. That is oxygen.
Connelly sits at the top of a firm that thrives on being underestimated. Accounting rarely makes the headlines, and the businesses that need it most are the ones with the least time to think about it. A 26-person company in Boise or Fernandina Beach is not shopping for thought leadership. It is shopping for someone who will close the month, flag the cash crunch before it bites, and explain the result in a sentence the owner can repeat to a banker. That is the unsexy, indispensable corner of the market Connelly has chosen to lead.
Better numbers for growing businesses.
Strip the firm down to its studs and you find two services that depend on each other. First, accounting - the daily, weekly, monthly discipline of recording what happened. Bookkeeping, accounts payable and receivable, bank and factor reconciliations, payroll, the catch-up work of cleaning up books that have been ignored for a quarter or three. This is the part nobody thanks you for until it is wrong.
Second, advisory - the part that turns a clean ledger into a plan. Cash-flow management, project profitability, budgeting, predictive KPIs, growth planning, the fractional-CFO guidance that a 26-person company cannot justify hiring full-time but cannot grow without. KeepingCount runs both on platform technologies built for the job, principally Sage Intacct and QuickBooks Online, so the recording and the reasoning live in the same place.
The trick Connelly's firm sells is not software and it is not spreadsheets. It is the handoff between a tidy set of books and a confident decision. A founder who knows their cost of goods sold, their project costing, and their cash runway behaves differently than one who is guessing. Better numbers change behavior. That is the whole thesis.
Directional illustration of an outsourced finance engagement, not reported KeepingCount figures.
A contractor pouring foundations and a biotech burning through a research grant do not have much in common. A vacation-rental operator juggling seasonal occupancy and a consumer-products brand managing cost of goods sold speak different languages. KeepingCount serves all of them, which tells you something about Connelly's bet: the accounting underneath every industry rhymes, even when the businesses do not.
Plenty of companies post values that read like a thesaurus accident. KeepingCount's five are unusually personal, the kind of words you would use to describe a colleague you trust rather than a brand you are selling. Under Connelly, they double as a hiring filter and a service standard - because in accounting, character and competence are not separable. The whole product is trust that someone else is watching the money.
The financial tools, understanding, and clarity to grow revenue, optimize operations, and keep your doors open far into the future.
KeepingCount was originally headquartered in Boise, Idaho - a fitting home for a firm built on plain-spoken reliability rather than coastal noise. Then it did what the best back-office work quietly enables: it stopped needing an address. The company now operates as a remote-first organization, with a team distributed across the country and clients who never needed their accountant to be in the next room, only to be right.
That shift is more than a real-estate decision. Remote-first means Connelly recruits talent by skill and values rather than by zip code, and it means a small business in one state can be served by the best-fit team in another. For a firm whose product is trust and accuracy, geography was always the least important variable. The numbers do not care where they are reconciled.
A growing company hits a wall: too big for shoebox bookkeeping, too small for a full finance department. Hiring a controller, a bookkeeper, and a CFO is six figures of payroll before anyone touches the actual problem. An outsourced partner like KeepingCount collapses that into one relationship - the discipline of a finance team without the overhead of building one. That is the gap Connelly's firm was built to fill.
A firm is only as good as the people closing the books each month. Connelly leads a compact leadership team spanning finance, revenue, delivery, and operations.
Better is doing a lot of quiet work in that mission statement. It does not mean prettier dashboards or more charts, though KeepingCount builds those too. It means numbers you can trust enough to bet the business on. A profit-and-loss statement that reflects reality because the bank feeds were reconciled, the factor statements were matched, and the inventory was counted - not estimated, not rounded, not carried over from a quarter everyone agreed to stop looking at. In accounting, the difference between roughly right and actually right is the difference between a confident decision and an expensive surprise.
That is why the unglamorous services matter so much. Catch-up accounting and books cleanup are the work of dragging a company's financial history back into focus after months of neglect. Bank and factor reconciliation is the discipline of proving, line by line, that the records agree with the world. Accounts payable and receivable keep the lifeblood moving in both directions. None of it photographs well. All of it is load-bearing. Connelly's firm treats the boring parts as the foundation precisely because everything advisory - the budgets, the KPIs, the growth plans - collapses if the foundation is fiction.
There is a reason owners describe the feeling of finally having clean books as relief rather than excitement. Uncertainty about money is a specific kind of background dread, and it follows founders into every room. Remove it, and they make sharper calls about hiring, pricing, inventory, and expansion. The product KeepingCount sells, underneath the line items, is the absence of that dread - the ability to look at a number and simply believe it.
Roughly right and actually right are different businesses.
Every engagement comes back to one anxious sentence: do we have the money we think we have? A firm that can answer it confidently, every month, on time, has earned a seat at the table for every decision that follows.
There is a version of business advice that is loud, fast, and forgettable. And then there is the version Jerry Connelly sells, which is none of those things. Reconcile the accounts. Date the books to today. Know your cash position before you need it, not after. Tell the owner the truth about the numbers, graciously and on time. It will never trend. It will, however, keep a company alive long enough to grow - which, for the businesses KeepingCount serves, is the only metric that has ever mattered.
Connelly's wager is that in a market obsessed with the next platform and the next round, a firm that simply gets the numbers right and explains them well will never run out of clients. He may be onto something. Somebody, after all, has to keep the count.
Profile compiled from public sources including KeepingCount's official website and LinkedIn. Where specifics were unverified, they were left out rather than guessed. Some chart figures are illustrative, as labeled.