Senior Finance Analyst - SMARTLY

A bit about Smartly, a Datacom Company

We exist to make it simpler for Kiwi businesses to look after their people. We’re known as the simple way to sort your payroll for over 20,000 businesses. Our slick software combined with our awesome support team helps businesses pay their people on time, accurately and in line with legislation.

As a fast-growing FinTech expanding into adjacent markets, Smartly offers a fast-paced, fun work environment with great opportunities for personal and professional development.

About the Role (your why)

The Senior Finance Analyst is a key commercial and analytical partner at Smartly, accountable for accelerating learning velocity and decision quality and learning velocity through high-impact financial insight.

As Smartly evolves from a single-product payroll provider into a multi-product, AI-enabled SaaS platform, this role plays a critical part in helping the organisation move faster without losing discipline. The Senior Finance Analyst connects strategy to numbers by translating growth ambitions, product bets, and go-to-market initiatives into clear hypotheses, robust financial signals, and timely recommendations.

Working closely with the Associate Director Finance and senior leaders across Product, Sales & Marketing, Operations, Delivery, and Data & AI, this role helps teams move quickly from signal → insight → decision. It lifts financial literacy across the business, challenges false certainty, and supports confident choices about where to invest, where to adapt, and where to stop.

In line with Smartly’s learning-led operating model, the Senior Finance Analyst treats finance not just as a planning and performance function, but as a learning accelerator — enabling faster, higher-quality decisions under uncertainty.

What you’ll do

As part of the At the moment, as Senior Finance Analyst role you will be focused on:

• Leading or supporting budgeting and forecasting for assigned functions, value streams, or products.
• Building and maintaining driver-based financial models for SaaS metrics such as MRR, ARR, churn, ARPU, CAC, LTV, and contribution margin.
• Partnering with budget owners to test assumptions, highlight risks and opportunities, and inform capital allocation decisions.
• Running scenario and sensitivity analysis on pricing, campaigns, investment timing, and people growth.
• Producing management reporting, variance analysis, and executive commentary for allocated business areas.
• Delivering deep-dive analysis on unit economics, funnel performance, churn drivers, product or segment profitability.
• Supporting product, GTM, and operations teams with commercial analysis for new initiatives.
• Preparing structured investment analyses for product, AI, GTM, or efficiency projects.
• Improving finance processes, reporting, systems, and adopting AI-enabled analytics tools.
• Promoting strong financial literacy and learning-led decision-making across the organisation.

We are a pretty agile company, and are keen to respond to customer, technology, and internal stakeholders’ changing requirements — and this can mean we evolve in our roles to meet those needs.

What you’ll bring

Required experience:

• 45–7+ years in finance roles focused on analysis, planning, and business partnering.
• Strong financial modelling and scenario planning skills, with advanced Excel capability
• Proven experience with forecasting, budgeting, management reporting, and variance analysis.
• Ability to translate financial data into strategic and commercial insight for non-finance stakeholders.
• Sound understanding (or ability to quickly learn) of SaaS metrics such as LTV, CAC, MRR/ARR, churn, and Rule of 40.

Nice to have:

• Experience operating in high-growth environments, SMEs, or SaaS/subscription-based businesses.
• Exposure to financial operations and controls (e.g., revenue recognition, accruals, cost allocations).
• Familiarity with BI/data tools such as Power BI, Tableau, or Looker.
• Bachelor’s degree in Accounting, Business, Commerce or Finance, and a professional qualification such as CA, CPA or CFA, or equivalent relevant experience.