How RevenueCat democratized finance without an FP&A team

“I actually don’t have a day in the life of Traci. My day changes based on when I open my computer.”

Traci Hirokawa leads Business Operations at RevenueCat, a platform that powers in-app subscriptions for over 32,000 mobile apps. BizOps can mean different things at different companies. For Traci, it means overseeing finance, legal, compliance, and more.

“Sometimes I focus on finance, reporting, and metrics. Other days I support our sales team with strategizing, running the deal desk, or jumping into deals,” Traci said. “And then there’s the random stuff—like preparing for board meetings, or assisting finance and accounting teams with month-end close.”

With a background in consulting, Traci had built various models before. But operating models were new to her. “It’s definitely been a trial by fire.”

The balancing act of a shrinking team

Traci’s role demands constant context-switching. Things got worse when the team size decreased from three to two, and they had to take on even more. “I don’t have a lot of time to really sit and focus on things.”

Around the same time, RevenueCat introduced new and more complex contract and billing structures, expanding focus from a self-serve customer base to enterprise app companies. “We used to do monthly usage-based billing, so you just had to multiply actuals by 12 to get ARR. Now we have both subscription-based revenue and usage-based revenue, making modeling very difficult.”

Traci would download data from QuickBooks and Looker, reconcile the two, and manually update her 20-tab spreadsheet. “There was so much room for error because I was just copy-pasting. While dragging formulas over, I had to double-check they were referencing the right column. Then I had to find pre-built charts in Looker, create the same segments, and go copy-pasting all over again.” Updating the model took about two half-days.

Collaborating with team members was equally challenging. “We’re a Google Suite company, so not everyone had Excel licenses. We’d buy them for those who needed to see the model, and upload new versions to Google Drive. It was super static.”

Because they worked with static spreadsheets, every finance-related question would go to Traci. “I’d have to open Excel, look around to figure it out, report the metric, and then reopen Excel to deal with the follow-up question later."

So when her team shrank, and the situation worsened, Traci started looking for a dedicated finance consultant. Things will get easier, she thought, after hiring someone.

Searching for something to help BizOps

Hiring a consultant would only add to Traci’s workload. They would have to learn the operating model—which, Traci said, “felt like a black box” because the understanding started and ended with her—and only then could they build and maintain a new financial model.

So Traci started looking at FP&A tools instead.

But that wasn’t easier. Some tools were too narrow, focusing exclusively on predictive modeling—they needed forecasts, but didn’t need to go that deep. Others were too clunky, and built for dedicated FP&A and RevOps teams, which RevenueCat didn’t have.

Then, a conversation with Austin Hay, a startup founder who’d worked at Runway in its early days, changed everything. “He asked what the most painful thing for me was. And I said, ‘FP&A. This thing just looms over my head every month. I’m always downloading data and doing manual updates.’ He recommended Runway.”

So Traci tried it out.

Setting up Runway was pretty straightforward. “I'm not a technical person, but setting up integrations was literally just me logging in,” Traci said. “The Runway team handled the rest—managing SQL and configuring our data tables.”

Within three weeks, RevenueCat was up and running. The P&L was modeled and balanced, integrations were live, and key metrics like profit margins, burn rates, and expense reports (with charts) were created. Traci was ready to bring a Runway reporting page to their monthly business review and an upcoming board meeting. “Runway’s team aggregated data at the levels we needed,” Traci said. “They answered all our questions within the day, which helped when I had to report on financial metrics and set everything up immediately.” And so, just a few weeks after she started using Runway, Traci said she became “confident enough to use it for reporting for the board meeting.”

Finding a way to make better decisions

With Runway, the manual work and constant back-and-forth finally disappeared. Traci didn’t have to spend two half-days each month updating her model anymore. "All I do is move the last close date, and the whole model gets updated automatically."

Runway enabled complex scenario planning, which wasn’t feasible with spreadsheets. There are different ways to look at sales capacity planning, Traci said, but she didn’t have the time to build out multiple scenarios in spreadsheets. “I can do that now, keeping all the data in one place. Annual planning this year will be a lot more thoughtful because of Runway. I love it.”

It isn’t just Traci who finds Runway easy to use. RevenueCat’s team is very developer-focused and technical, she said, including the founders. “Runway's pull-request system, with branches and scenarios, was so intuitive, our CEO just jumped in and started building models without training.” Now their leadership team can just log into Runway to understand their financials.

A few days ago, Jacob [their CEO] wanted to know if GTM initiatives were effective. “With Excel, I probably would have just said, ‘Based on vibes, here's what I think. Or I’d have spent a week figuring it out,’ “ Traci said. In Runway, she just took a few hours to create a detailed page showing the metrics, and added text to explain the insights. “All he had to do was read the story, look at the charts, and dig into the drivers if needed. Everything happened async.”

In the end, Traci found exactly what she was looking for. She saved time, simplified finance for everyone, and did things she couldn’t do before—without having to hire a finance consultant. “I’ve always been the gatekeeper of financial data—not on purpose, but because of how things were set up. Now, making that data open, available, and easy to work with enables our team to make better decisions.”