Credentials and experience

Where it started. I grew up in a working-class household in Austin, and I learned early that the people who depend on you notice whether the work gets done right. Accounting suited that. I finished my accounting degree at Texas State with a 4.00 GPA in the major and went to work.

Learning the mechanics. My first accounting job was inventory control at Samuels Jewelers. I reconciled and maintained inventory across the chain, ran store-level bank reconciliations every month, and helped coordinate company-wide counts twice a year. It taught me something I still rely on: a balance is only as good as the count behind it.

Corporate accounting at scale. From 2019 to 2022 I was a corporate staff accountant at American Campus Communities, a public real estate company. I ran monthly, quarterly, and year-end closes, reconciled intercompany accounts for wholly owned subsidiaries, and compiled and presented the Canadian subsidiary’s financial statements, including currency conversion into the parent company’s reporting.

Controller of a venture-backed software company. In 2022 I joined a venture-backed software company as Lead Accountant and was promoted to Assistant Controller and then Controller. Over four years I owned the accounting and finance function of a growing business: close, US GAAP reporting and revenue recognition, cash positioning and cash forecasting, budgeting and forecasting, financial modeling, management and board reporting, and audit coordination, working with the company’s outside accounting and tax providers. It is where I learned to connect budgets, forecasts, commercial metrics, revenue planning, and cash to the decisions leadership actually makes.

Finance lead for a private family office. In 2026 I moved to a private family office as Portfolio Finance Lead, reporting directly to ownership across a multi-entity portfolio of real estate, operating businesses, and investments. The mandate was cleanup and rebuild: legacy books across the portfolio, balance-sheet support, and owner, lender, and tax reporting that ownership had not had before, all built from one tied set of books. I rebuilt fixed-asset records and separated owner funding from debt, built ownership’s first consolidated cash and debt-maturity view and a recurring cash report, took over recurring billing and cleaned up recovery revenue, assembled lender packages, put bank-side payment controls in place across every account, underwrote acquisitions ownership was weighing, and surfaced prior-year tax issues for the outside tax advisors with the support to act on them.

The practice. JR Gonzales CPA, PLLC brings that range to business owners who need what those owners and leadership teams needed: books they can rely on, reporting that explains what happened, and plans that connect to the decisions in front of them.

What AI does, and what it never does. I use AI the way a controller uses staff: to draft, reconcile, trace, and check, never to decide. Nothing reaches your books, your lender, your tax advisor, or you without my review and approval. AI does not post entries, send messages, or approve anything, and a person approves every change before it happens.

How the work is checked. The system that builds a piece of work never reviews it.

• A second, independent AI system reviews material work and traces every computed number back to its source before I see it.
• On the highest-stakes work, a third review from outside the build challenges the conclusions.
• Review loops are capped. Disagreements are preserved rather than smoothed over, and anything unresolved comes to me with both positions. I decide.
• Missing information is reported as missing. Nothing is estimated into existence to fill a gap.
• A self-check written by the same system that did the work is treated as convenience, never as evidence. Independent review is the control.
• Before anything is called finished, I reread the original request and confirm every requirement was met or is named as open. Recurring workbooks and templates earn the word “reusable” only after one real run on real work.

What I have built with it. In my last in-house role I built ledger automation under exactly these controls: every entry duplicate-checked against the live books, approved by a person before posting, and verified after posting, with payments and deletions blocked by design. It handled hundreds of entries that way. Around it I built a reusable set of controller workflows: entity diagnostics, adjusting-entry packages, fixed-asset registers, intercompany reconciliation, billing review, cash forecasting, and model audit, all governed by defined sources of truth, decision logs, and deliverable standards. Several AI systems work together as one governed workflow with the roles kept separate: the one that builds never reviews, and only one path can write to a ledger. Financial models and reporting workbooks go through the same gates, recalculated in live Excel, checked for errors, and tied to source before anything is called done.

Your data. The AI tools I use run on enterprise plans whose terms do not allow the providers to train their models on the data. Client financial information does go into those tools when the work calls for it, and sensitive personal identifiers such as Social Security numbers stay out. Client files live on my own equipment, and deliverables come back to you through whatever system you already use. Client information stays confidential to the engagement and is not shared with anyone outside the work.

What this means for you. The work is faster and more thorough than one person could make it alone, the cost of an error goes down, and the judgment stays with a CPA who is accountable to you. This is not a service I sell. It is how I deliver the ones I do.

• I do not prepare or sign tax returns. I work alongside your tax preparer and give them a clean, supported package.
• I do not perform audits, reviews, or other attestation services.
• I do not give investment or securities advice.
• I do not process payroll, pay bills, move money, or hold client funds.

• Certified Public Accountant, Texas.
• JR Gonzales CPA, PLLC, a Texas professional limited liability company formed in 2026.

• Volunteer treasurer for a property owners association in the Austin area, 2020 to 2024: kept the books and reported monthly to the members.
• Volunteer tax preparer in the 2017 season with a VITA program, with the IRS Advanced certification for that season.