Shane Tjin — Finance leadership for high-growth SaaS

~$140M

Capital raises over four years on forecasts and board packages I owned

>15 pts

Gross-margin lift from pricing floors and classifying GCP into cost of revenue vs R&D

~5-day

Monthly close — one package, automated financials load, AR aging retired

~0.3%

Billing, CRM, and ARR reconciled so the board number ties to the invoice

Close

The close, compressed.

Close tasks move from one-after-another to running in parallel. The finish line slides from day 19 to day 5.

Books closedDay 19

The “before” timeline (day 19) is a placeholder. Swap in the real starting point when ready.

Ownership

What I own

Decisions I set, packages I approve, and systems I design — the risk a finance lead is hired to carry.

Set
Company ARR definitions
Close-date recognition and conversion counting — the definitions the board number runs on.
Owned
Billing ↔ CRM ↔ ARR reconciliation
Kept the commercial stack and the board bridge on the same number.
Owned
Monthly close package
Merged the close workbooks, automated the financials load, retired AR aging.
Owned
Working capital & cash forecast
Months of runway visible to leadership before the board asks.
Designed
BDR comp with Sales
Comp plan built with Sales so incentives matched the forecast model.
Approved
Pricing floors & deal-desk rules
Discount guardrails that held margin instead of leaking deal by deal.
Automated
Weekly leadership notes
Variance and operating readout on a schedule — hours back each week for judgment, not drafting.

Modeling

End-to-end modeling: what I own

One driver-based model. The inputs that move the business flow through the P&L into cash and runway, and on to the board pack.

Drivers

Bookings & usage Headcount Cloud & vendor cost

Model

P&L

Linkage

Cash & runway

Output

Board pack

Illustrative structure, not company data.

01 · Revenue

Revenue & ARR build

I own the ARR engine: new, expansion, contraction and churn across product-led and sales-led motions, tied back to the forecast.

Retired a fragile monthly workbook. FP&A and GTM now run on one ARR bridge.
02 · Costs

Costs, cloud & vendor commitments

I own GCP and AWS cost end to end: usage-driven spend tracked against committed spend, cloud cost split between COGS and R&D, and prepay vs pay-as-you-go modeled for margin and cash.

Gross margin up >15 pts from pricing floors and cloud-cost classification.
03 · Cash

Cash & runway

I own the working-capital and cash forecast, trace P&L items to cash, and stress-test runway with a zero-growth case.

Leadership sees runway before the board asks.
04 · Cadence

Plan vs actuals & scenarios

I run monthly flux reviews with every department head and model driver-based scenarios. That includes where headcount sits for budget, margin and capitalization.

All of it sits on a ~5-day monthly close.
05 · Outputs

Board & investor reporting

I own the forecasts and quarterly board packages, plus a weekly exec readout of pipeline, ARR, margin and runway.

~$140M raised over four years.

Automated ARR Tracker as the ARR source of truth · financials load and weekly leadership notes · pricing workbook turned into a live CRM quote calculator.

Systems

Proof

How the revenue engine flows, how three systems become one number, a short brand reel on the close, and the ARR Tracker that replaced a fragile monthly workbook.

Revenue engine

One revenue engine, with an owner for every leak.

Pipeline to cash as a single flow. Money moves left to right; each leak (lost deals, discounting, churn, slow collections) is shown in clay.

FP&A and RevOps own the whole flow. Widths are illustrative, not company data.

Reconciliation

Three systems, one number.

Billing, CRM and the customer master each list the same accounts in a different order. They snap into line on a single customer ID — then ARR builds.

Billing

CRM

Customer master

ARR

Unreconciled: 3 sources, 3 answers

Account names are fictional.

Case study

ARR Tracker

One system that replaced a fragile monthly workbook — and became the shared ARR bridge for FP&A and GTM.

Problem

Monthly ARR movement lived in a fragile workbook. Product-led and sales-led motions disagreed on definitions. Board and GTM reviews started from conflicting bridges.

What I built

A custom web app that replaced the workbook: bridge by new, expansion, and churn, split across PLG and SLG motions, with ARR rules encoded once.

Decisions I owned

Company ARR definitions (close-date recognition, conversion counting), how PLG and SLG bridge together, and which source of truth the board and Sales would both run on.

Result

One shared ARR bridge for FP&A and GTM. The fragile monthly workbook was retired.

Also built

Pricing → CRM → Slack approvals — one-click quote push with tiered Approve/Reject by discount, ARR, and term.
Executive operating readout — weekly package with pipeline, ARR, margin, and runway in one reconciled view.
GTM funnel & CAC model — single-driver acquisition model with FP&A-owned payback tracking.
Churn-risk scoring — Gong and CS signals into weekly save playbooks so CS works the highest-risk accounts first.

Onboarding

First 90 days as your finance lead

What a hiring CEO can expect — concrete enough to measure, generic enough to transfer.

Days 1–30

Foundation

Lock ARR and margin definitions. Stand up a cash/runway view. Publish a close calendar. Map who owns what across Finance, Sales, and Product.
Days 31–60

Controls & cadence

Billing ↔ CRM ↔ ARR reconciliation. Forecast cadence leadership can run. Pricing floors and deal-desk rules that hold.
Days 61–90

Board rhythm

Board package on one reconciled story. Operating rhythm that survives without heroics. First hire or capacity plan if the function needs it.

How I work

How I run the function.

One view of the business

FP&A and RevOps belong together. Pipeline, ARR, billing, margin, and cash should reconcile in one place — not in three decks that disagree.

Systems before heroics

Close calendars, pricing floors, deal-desk rules, and board packages beat last-minute spreadsheets. The point is a repeatable operating rhythm.

Build the function, not just the model

Cadence, ownership maps, and the next hire matter as much as the spreadsheet. I leave a finance seat that runs without me in the room.

Background

A short path

Trajectory

A career that compounds.

Controls, then forecasting, then running FP&A and RevOps together — drawn as a growth curve.

Nylas 2021 – present

Grew from RevOps into Head of Corporate FP&A & RevOps. Built the function — planning, pricing, board narrative, and commercial systems.
Birdeye 2018 – 2021

Built the first integrated forecast and finance/RevOps playbook for a Series B SaaS company; shifted channel spend with LTV/CAC discipline.
First Republic · Bayview 2014 – 2018

Risk, controls, and program leadership before moving into operating-company finance.

Bentley University, B.S. Corporate Finance & Accounting. PMP.

About

Based in San Francisco

I’ve worked in SaaS finance and revenue operations since 2014 — owning planning systems, commercial discipline, and the board narrative that ties them together.

Fluent in English and Dutch.

Contact

Happy to talk about finance leadership, planning systems, or building the function.

shanetwj@gmail.com

LinkedIn GitHub