Investor Relations

How to answer investor q&a and info requests as Asset Management Founders

Investor RelationsFor Asset Management Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Every quarter, LPs send a mix of ad-hoc questions — fund-level IRR, TVPI, a specific portfolio company's latest metrics, a copy of the subscription agreement, a breakdown of fees. You're answering these from memory, from a spreadsheet open in another tab, or by digging through a Dropbox folder you haven't organized since the fund launched. There's no investor portal because the ones built for that cost $50k a year and assume you have a dedicated IR associate. So questions sit in your inbox longer than they should, your answers are inconsistent across LPs, and every new request feels like a small fire drill.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Investor RelationsFor Asset Management Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A structured knowledge base that holds your fund's FAQs, portfolio updates, fee terms, and LP-specific context — so you can pull answers in seconds instead of digging through email threads

An email triage layer that flags LP inquiries by urgency, drafts accurate replies using your fund docs, and reminds you about anything you haven't responded to within 24 hours

A repeatable investor reporting workflow that auto-populates fund financials from your connected accounts, so one-off LP questions get answered with the same numbers that appear in your quarterly letters

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

Knowledge Management Investor Reporting

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your QuickBooks, Stripe, and Plaid data on a schedule for fund financials — those power both the Investor Reporting template and the knowledge base's portfolio snapshots. Gmail is connected as a scheduled-sync provider for email triage. Fund documents (PPMs, subscription agreements, side letters stored in Notion or Google Drive) are connected from Starch's integration catalog and queried live when the knowledge base needs to surface them. Any LP-specific portal or data room that lives on the web can be automated through your browser — no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Build me a fund knowledge base organized by: (1) LP Q&A — common questions about fees, waterfall, and reporting cadence with our standard answers; (2) Portfolio company snapshots — one page per company with latest KPIs and narrative; (3) Fund documents — index of PPM, subscription agreements, side letters by LP name. Flag any doc that hasn't been updated in 90 days.

Set up an email triage agent for my inbox that identifies messages from LPs, labels them high/medium/low by urgency, drafts a reply pulling from the fund knowledge base where relevant, and sends me a daily digest of any LP email unanswered for more than 24 hours.

Every quarter, pull our fund's cash flow data from Plaid, transaction data from Stripe, and portfolio financials from QuickBooks, then generate a standardized LP update that includes: fund-level metrics (TVPI, DPI, RVPI, net IRR), portfolio company summaries, capital call status, and any material events. Format it as a PDF I can attach to LP responses.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect QuickBooks, Stripe, and Plaid as scheduled-sync providers so Starch has live fund financials — cash balances, capital deployed, management fee invoices, carried interest calculations — ready without you pulling them manually each time.

2 Connect Gmail as a scheduled-sync provider; this is what powers the email triage agent's ability to read threads, identify LP senders, and draft contextual replies.

3 Install the Knowledge Management app from the Starch App Store and prompt it to build an LP Q&A section: paste in your PPM's fee and waterfall language, your standard reporting cadence, and the five questions you get every quarter. Starch structures these into a searchable knowledge base.

4 Add a portfolio company snapshot section to the knowledge base — one entry per portfolio company with current ARR, headcount, last funding round, and a two-sentence narrative. Tell Starch to pull any metric it can from connected accounts and flag the rest for you to fill in manually.

5 Index your fund documents: connect your Google Drive from Starch's integration catalog so the knowledge base can reference PPMs, subscription agreements, and side letters by LP name when drafting replies.

6 Install the Email Triage app (Founder Inbox) and configure it to label LP emails by urgency. Tell Starch which email addresses or domains belong to LPs so it can triage correctly — high urgency for capital call questions, medium for routine update requests, low for introductions and referrals.

7 Set up a 24-hour follow-up reminder automation: 'If any email labeled LP-High or LP-Medium has no reply after 24 hours, send me a Slack message with the subject line and the sender.' This keeps nothing from slipping without requiring you to manually track your inbox.

8 Install the Investor Reporting app and run it at quarter-end to generate a fund update from your synced QuickBooks, Stripe, and Plaid data. The output — fund-level TVPI, DPI, net IRR, capital deployed, unrealized value by company — becomes the source of truth you reference when answering LP questions.

9 Wire the Investor Reporting output back into the knowledge base: tell Starch to update the fund metrics section of the knowledge base each time a quarterly report is generated, so the knowledge base stays current without a separate update step.

10 When an LP emails a question, the triage agent surfaces the thread, drafts a reply pulling from the knowledge base, and presents it for your one-click review. You're editing, not writing from scratch.

11 For one-off document requests (a specific LP's subscription agreement, a side letter), prompt Starch to find and attach the relevant file from your connected Google Drive without you searching for it manually.

12 At each quarter close, run the full cycle once: generate the investor report, update the knowledge base, review any open LP threads the triage agent flagged, and send. The entire cycle targets under two hours instead of two days.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

Q1 2026 LP Q&A cycle — $42M AUM, 18 LPs

Sample numbers from a real run

Fund NAV (per Plaid + QuickBooks sync)	38,200,000
Capital called to date	28,500,000
Unrealized value (portfolio)	16,400,000
Management fees invoiced Q1	105,000
Carry accrual (notional)	870,000

In the two weeks after Q1 close, seven LPs sent questions ranging from 'What's our current net IRR?' to 'Can you send me a copy of our subscription agreement?' to 'What's the latest on Portfolio Company C?' Previously, each of these required manually pulling the cap table model, searching a shared Dropbox for PDFs, and writing a bespoke email. With Starch running, the Investor Reporting app had already generated the Q1 update pulling $38.2M NAV, 1.34x TVPI, and 9.8% net IRR directly from QuickBooks and Plaid — those numbers lived in the knowledge base before the first LP question arrived. The triage agent flagged all seven LP threads within the first hour of each arriving, drafted replies citing the correct figures, and attached subscription agreements from Google Drive in three of the cases. The fund manager reviewed and sent all seven replies in 35 minutes. The one question that required judgment — a limited partner asking about the fund's strategy shift toward climate tech companies — got a manual reply; Starch flagged it as outside its knowledge base scope rather than drafting something inaccurate.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

LP email response time (target: under 24 hours on all flagged threads)

Time spent on quarterly LP Q&A cycle (target: under 2 hours per quarter-close)

Fund-level net IRR and TVPI, refreshed from live QuickBooks and Plaid data each quarter

Knowledge base coverage — percentage of recurring LP questions with a documented answer

Open LP threads older than 48 hours (target: zero)

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Juniper Square or Addepar

Purpose-built for fund reporting and LP portals, but $50k+ per year with implementation timelines and dedicated ops assumptions — not realistic for a fund under $100M AUM with no IR staff.

Manual email + Dropbox + Excel

Costs nothing upfront, but LP questions take 30–90 minutes each to answer accurately, consistency across LPs is hard to maintain, and nothing about it scales as your LP count grows.

Notion wiki + Gmail + a CRM

You can stitch this together, but there's no automation layer — your knowledge base doesn't update when your financials change, and your inbox doesn't triage itself. You're still doing the connective tissue by hand.

A fund admin firm

Handles NAV calculation and LP statements accurately, but adds cost, turnaround lag on ad-hoc requests, and doesn't help you draft narrative replies or triage your own inbox.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — knowledge management, founder inbox, investor reporting 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

Can Starch actually calculate fund-level metrics like IRR and TVPI, or does it just pull raw numbers?

Starch syncs your QuickBooks, Stripe, and Plaid data on a schedule and can compute derived metrics like net IRR, TVPI, DPI, and RVPI from that data — but the quality of the output depends on how cleanly your books are structured. If your QuickBooks has properly categorized capital calls, distributions, and management fees, Starch can build the calculations. If your accounting has gaps, you'll need to review and correct before trusting the outputs. Starch won't silently produce wrong numbers — it will surface what it can calculate and flag what it can't.

Does Starch have an LP-facing portal where my investors can log in and pull their own documents?

Not today. Starch is an operator-side tool — it helps you answer LP questions faster, not give LPs self-serve access. If you need a true LP portal with login-protected document access and investor-specific reporting, tools like Juniper Square or Visible are designed for that. Starch is better suited to funds where the GP handles LP communication directly and wants to do it faster.

Will the knowledge base stay accurate as my fund metrics change each quarter?

Yes, if you set it up to. The recommended approach is to wire the Investor Reporting app output back into the knowledge base so that after each quarterly report is generated from your synced financial data, the fund metrics section updates automatically. Portfolio company snapshots, however, require you to review and refresh narrative details — Starch can pull any metrics that come from connected data sources, but narrative context (strategy pivots, key hires, risks) needs your input.

What happens if an LP asks something the knowledge base doesn't have a good answer to?

The triage agent will draft what it can from available context and flag the reply for your review rather than sending something speculative. It won't hallucinate an answer to a question about a specific portfolio company's financials if that data isn't in the knowledge base. You'll see the draft, see what it's missing, and write that part yourself. The goal is that 70–80% of LP emails have a solid first draft ready; the rest just get flagged clearly.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? My LPs ask about security due diligence.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your LP base includes institutional investors with formal vendor security requirements, you should flag this before committing. Starch is a good fit for emerging managers with individual LPs, family offices, and institutions that are comfortable with a data security disclosure rather than a formal SOC 2 report.

Can Starch handle LP-specific reporting — where one LP gets a different view than another?

You can build LP-specific context into the knowledge base — noting which LP has a side letter, which has a different carry tier, which is in Fund I versus Fund II. The triage agent can use that context when drafting replies. Fully automated, LP-by-LP reporting with separate portal views isn't a current feature, but if you describe what you want Starch to generate per LP, you can build a workflow that produces customized outputs on demand.