Finance & FP&A

How to analyze vendor and category spend as Event Agency Founders

Finance & FP&AFor Event Agency Founders2 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Your vendor spend is scattered across three places at once: the invoice emails buried in Gmail threads for each event, the bank statements you download from your business checking account every month, and the spreadsheet where you manually paste totals by vendor category — AV, catering, florals, rentals, staffing. You don't have a clean view of what you actually spent on Occasions Catering across all Q1 events until you're already deep into Q2. You can't tell whether your AV vendor is getting more expensive quarter-over-quarter or whether that spike in March was one unusually large corporate gig. Month-end reconciliation eats a Friday afternoon you don't have.

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Finance & FP&AFor Event Agency Founders2 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live vendor spend dashboard that shows every transaction from your business bank account categorized by vendor and event-service type — AV, catering, florals, staffing, venue — updated daily without any manual exports.

Automatic anomaly alerts when a vendor charges more than their usual range, so you catch a billing mistake before you've already paid and moved on.

A month-over-month trend view by spend category that tells you whether your per-event vendor costs are trending up and which category is driving it.

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Transaction Insights Runway Analysis

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your bank account data on a schedule through Plaid — transactions, balances, and categories arrive daily and live in Starch's database. The Transaction Insights and Runway Analysis starter apps wire directly to that Plaid feed. If you also run client payments through Stripe, Starch syncs your Stripe revenue on a schedule so your net burn calculation reflects both sides. Gmail can be connected so vendor invoice threads can be referenced in the same workspace — Starch connects directly to Gmail and syncs your messages on a schedule.

Prompts to copy

Build me a vendor spend dashboard using my Plaid bank feed. Break transactions into categories: AV, catering, florals, venue rental, staffing, and other. Show me month-over-month totals for each category and flag any vendor who charged me more than 20% above their average this month.

Add a view that shows my top 10 vendors by total spend over the last 6 months, with a sparkline of their monthly charges. I want to see which ones are growing and which are flat.

Set up an alert: if any single vendor transaction exceeds $3,000, send me a Slack message with the vendor name, amount, and the bank account it hit.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect your business checking account through Plaid — Starch syncs your transactions on a schedule, pulling categorized spend, balances, and payee names daily.

2 Install the Transaction Insights starter app from the Starch App Store. Out of the box it shows month-over-month category trends and flags anomalies. Use it as-is or tell Starch how to relabel categories to match how your agency thinks about vendor spend (AV, catering, florals, staffing, venue).

3 Tell Starch: 'Rename the default spending categories to match these event-vendor buckets: AV & Production, Catering & F&B, Floral & Décor, Venue Rental, Staffing & Day-Of Labor, and Other.' Starch rebuilds the category view around your terminology.

4 Set up the vendor-level drill-down by prompting: 'Add a vendor detail view that shows every transaction from a given payee, sorted by date, with a running total and a 6-month average charge.' Now you can click into 'Occasions Catering' and see every invoice paid.

5 Configure anomaly alerts: tell Starch the threshold that matters to you (e.g., 20% above a vendor's 3-month average, or any single charge over $3,000) and ask it to route alerts to Slack or email.

6 Install Runway Analysis to sit alongside Transaction Insights. Connect Stripe if you invoice clients there. Starch syncs your Stripe revenue on a schedule and combines it with Plaid expense data to show real net burn and a 24-month forward projection.

7 Ask Starch to build a per-event cost view: 'Create a table where I can tag transactions to specific events by keyword-matching the vendor name or memo field. Show me total vendor spend per event and average per-event cost by category.'

8 Set up a weekly summary automation: 'Every Monday at 8am, pull last week's transactions, group them by vendor category, and send me a Slack message with total spend by category and any new vendors who charged my account for the first time.'

9 Use the month-over-month trend view to prep for client budget conversations — if your AV costs per event have risen 15% over six months, you have the number to show when you update your production line items.

10 At quarter close, ask Starch: 'Summarize Q1 vendor spend by category. Show me which categories grew versus Q4, which vendors accounted for more than 10% of total spend, and whether my gross margin per event improved or declined.' Starch pulls from the synced Plaid data and writes the summary in plain English.

See this running on Starch

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Worked example

Q1 2026 Vendor Spend Close — Meridian Events Co.

Sample numbers from a real run

AV & Production (3 corporate events)	18,400
Catering & F&B (4 events, 2 caterers)	31,200
Floral & Décor (4 events, 1 vendor)	9,800
Venue Rental (2 off-site events)	14,500
Staffing & Day-Of Labor	11,600
Other (permits, transport, misc)	4,100

Meridian Events ran seven events in Q1. Before Starch, the founder spent three hours on the last Friday of March manually pulling bank statements, cross-referencing Gmail invoice threads, and building a Google Sheet to total spend by category. With Starch's Plaid sync running daily, the Transaction Insights dashboard already had all 89 transactions categorized and vendor-labeled before March 31. The anomaly alert fired on March 14 when SoundCraft AV invoiced $6,200 — 34% above their $4,600 Q4 average — which turned out to be an additional setup day that hadn't been approved in writing. The Runway Analysis dashboard showed $18,900 net burn for the month (expenses minus incoming Stripe client payments), with a forward projection showing 11 months of cash at current pace. The Monday Slack summary on April 7 flagged a new vendor — a freelance lighting tech paid $850 via Zelle — that hadn't appeared before, prompting the founder to get a W-9 on file before Q2 filing season.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Total vendor spend per event (by event type: corporate, social, nonprofit)

Vendor category as % of total event cost (AV, catering, florals, staffing, venue)

Month-over-month change in per-category spend across all events

New vendors charged in the last 60 days (catch unauthorized or one-off charges)

Gross margin per event: client invoice total minus total vendor spend for that event

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

QuickBooks + manual bank reconciliation

QuickBooks categorizes transactions but requires manual reconciliation every month and gives you accounting-style reports, not the event-agency breakdowns you actually use — you'd still build the vendor-by-category view yourself in a spreadsheet.

HoneyBook or Dubsado built-in reporting

These track what you invoiced clients and what proposals converted, but they don't see your bank account — vendor spend you pay outside the platform is invisible, so you never get a true per-event cost picture.

Google Sheets + bank export

Fully flexible but entirely manual: downloading CSVs, pasting, and re-categorizing every month is exactly the Friday-afternoon problem Starch replaces, and the sheet goes stale the moment you close it.

Xero (connected from Starch's integration catalog)

Xero is a full accounting ledger and handles tax categories and payroll correctly — if your accountant lives in Xero, keep it; Starch's spend dashboard is a faster operational view, not a replacement for your books.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — transaction insights, runway analysis all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Does Starch actually see my bank transactions, or do I have to upload CSV exports?

Starch syncs your bank data on a schedule through Plaid — the same connection your bank's own budgeting tools use. No CSV uploads. Once you connect, transactions come in daily. Plaid connects to thousands of US banks and credit unions; if your business account is at a major bank, it almost certainly works.

Can I tag transactions to specific events, or does it only show me spend by category?

You can build a tagging view. Tell Starch something like: 'Create a table where I can match transactions to events by vendor name or memo keyword, and show me total spend per event.' Starch builds that surface. It's not automatic — you'd define the matching rules — but once you do, the tagging runs against every new transaction.

What if I pay vendors by check, Zelle, or Venmo — will those show up?

If the payment clears through your connected bank account, Plaid picks it up — Zelle transfers and ACH payments appear as transactions. Checks show up when they clear. Venmo depends on whether your Venmo balance ties to the same business bank account; if it does, yes. Cash payments won't appear because they don't hit the bank feed.

I use QuickBooks for my books. Does Starch replace it?

No, and it's not trying to. Starch gives you a fast operational view of where your money is going — updated daily, broken down the way your agency thinks about spend, with anomaly alerts. QuickBooks is your accounting ledger for taxes and your accountant. Most agency founders run both: Starch for the day-to-day 'what did I spend on AV this quarter' question, QuickBooks for the annual close.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I'm careful about what touches my bank credentials.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified yet. Plaid — the layer that handles bank credential authentication — is itself SOC 2 certified and used by thousands of fintech products. Starch does not store your bank login credentials. That said, if SOC 2 Type II certification is a hard requirement for your agency or a client contract, it's an honest limit to know upfront.

Can Starch pull vendor invoices from my Gmail and match them to transactions?

Starch connects directly to Gmail and syncs your messages on a schedule. You can build an app that reads invoice-related emails from specific vendors and surfaces them alongside the matching Plaid transaction. Tell Starch: 'Pull Gmail threads where the subject contains invoice or receipt from these vendor domains and show them next to the matching bank transaction.' It won't be perfect auto-matching out of the box, but you can describe the logic and Starch builds the surface.