Investor Relations

How to answer investor q&a and info requests as Small Investor Relations Teams

Investor RelationsFor Small Investor Relations Teams3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Your LP just emailed asking why the Q3 commitment pacing numbers in the letter don't match what they see in the portal. You pull up QuickBooks, the Plaid dashboard, a Google Sheet your CFO built two years ago, and a DocSend link that may or may not be current. It takes 90 minutes to confirm the answer was a rounding difference. Meanwhile, three more LP emails sit unanswered. A 2-person IR team fielding 40+ LP inquiries per quarter doesn't have a research problem — you know where the data lives. You have a retrieval and assembly problem. Every answer requires opening five tabs, cross-referencing two systems, and writing a bespoke email that will never be reused.

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Investor RelationsFor Small Investor Relations Teams3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live investor Q&A inbox where Starch triages incoming LP questions by urgency, drafts replies backed by real-time data from QuickBooks, Stripe, and Plaid, and flags anything that needs your sign-off before sending

A knowledge base of evergreen LP answers — J-curve mechanics, commitment pacing logic, fee calculation methodology — so the same question never costs you 30 minutes twice

A monthly investor update workflow that pulls live financials, writes the narrative draft, and emails your LP list on cadence — with one-click edits before it goes out

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

Investor Reporting Knowledge Management

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule (invoices, bills, payments, journal entries) and your Plaid data on a schedule (transactions and balances). Stripe is synced on a schedule for subscription and payment data. Gmail is synced on a schedule for LP email threads. LP portals like DocSend or Intralinks are automated through your browser — no API needed. Notion is synced on a schedule for your internal knowledge base if you're already storing SOPs there.

Prompts to copy

Build me an investor Q&A inbox that reads incoming emails from LPs in Gmail, categorizes each question by type (capital calls, commitment pacing, portfolio performance, fees, distributions), drafts a reply pulling current figures from QuickBooks and Plaid, and surfaces any question that references a number I haven't verified yet

Create a monthly investor reporting workflow that pulls MRR and cash balances from Stripe and Plaid, formats a narrative update with burn rate and runway, and emails it to my LP list from Gmail on the last business day of each month

Build a knowledge management app that stores our standard LP Q&A answers — J-curve explanation, commitment pacing methodology, fee waterfall logic — and lets me search them instantly when a new question comes in so I'm not rewriting the same explanation from scratch

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Gmail — Starch syncs your LP email threads on a schedule, giving the Email Triage app a live view of incoming investor questions. Set a filter label like 'LP-inbound' so the agent only triages IR-relevant mail, not everything in your inbox.

2 Connect QuickBooks and Plaid — Starch syncs both on a schedule. QuickBooks gives you the entity-level detail (invoices, payments, journal entries); Plaid gives you categorized transactions and live cash balances. These are the two sources your LP answers almost always trace back to.

3 Connect Stripe if your fund or company has subscription revenue — Starch syncs charges, invoices, and MRR data on a schedule so investor update numbers match what's actually in your payment system.

4 Start the Investor Reporting app from the App Store. Out of the box it generates a monthly update from Stripe and Plaid data. Customize it to add QuickBooks figures and to match the tone of your existing LP letters — tell Starch: 'Use the formal but direct tone from our Q3 2025 letter, not a startup-casual voice.'

5 Start the Email Triage app and tell Starch to categorize incoming LP emails. Prompt: 'When an LP asks about commitment pacing, draft a reply using current QuickBooks payment data and our standard pacing methodology. Flag it for my review before sending.' The agent drafts; you approve; nothing goes out unreviewed.

6 Set up the Knowledge Management app to store your master Q&A library. Paste in your five most-asked LP questions and the answers you've already written. Starch auto-indexes them. Next time a similar question arrives, the Email Triage agent pulls the relevant answer instead of starting from scratch.

7 Wire an automation: 'Every time an LP email arrives tagged LP-inbound, classify it, check the knowledge base for a matching answer, draft a reply, and add it to my review queue in Slack.' This runs without you touching it — you see a Slack message with a draft reply attached.

8 For LP portal requests — someone needing DocSend access or a data room file — tell Starch: 'When an LP emails requesting data room access, automate opening our DocSend portal through the browser and granting view access to their email address, then reply confirming access.' Starch automates the DocSend steps through your browser — no DocSend API needed.

9 Build a commitment tracker as a custom Starch app on top of QuickBooks and Plaid data. Prompt: 'Build me a view that shows each LP's committed capital, called capital to date, remaining unfunded commitment, and expected next call date, pulling from QuickBooks payment records and my manually-maintained commitment schedule in Notion.' This replaces the Google Sheet your CFO keeps updating.

10 Schedule the monthly investor update automation for the last business day of each month. Tell Starch: 'On the last business day of each month, pull current MRR from Stripe, cash balance from Plaid, and net burn from QuickBooks, draft the monthly LP update using last month's letter as a tone reference, and send it to my investor list from Gmail after I approve it.' You review once; it sends.

11 Audit the first three automated draft replies before trusting the workflow. Check that QuickBooks figures match what you'd pull manually, that the tone is right, and that the knowledge base answers are being retrieved correctly. Adjust the prompts once; the workflow learns from the correction.

12 Publish your commitment tracker and Q&A workflow as internal Starch apps your CFO can also access — so they stop maintaining a parallel Google Sheet and start pulling from the same live data you're using.

See this running on Starch

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Worked example

April 2026 LP Information Request — Hamilton Street Capital

Sample numbers from a real run

LP committed capital (Hamilton Street)	5,000,000
Capital called to date (3 calls)	3,250,000
Remaining unfunded commitment	1,750,000
Last distribution (Q1 2026)	187,500
Current cash balance (Plaid)	2,340,000

Hamilton Street's IR associate emails on a Tuesday afternoon asking for a summary of their commitment status, the Q1 2026 distribution details, and a reconciliation of why the fund-level cash balance in the quarterly letter ($2.4M) differs from the figure in the portal ($2.34M). Pre-Starch, this is a 90-minute job: open QuickBooks, pull payment history for Hamilton Street specifically, cross-reference three capital call notices in a DocSend folder, check Plaid for the exact end-of-quarter balance, write a bespoke email. With Starch, the Email Triage app catches the email, classifies it as a commitment-pacing-plus-reconciliation question, pulls Hamilton Street's QuickBooks payment records ($3.25M called across three invoices), pulls the Q1 Plaid balance as of March 31 ($2.34M vs the $2.4M rounded figure used in the letter), and drafts a reply explaining the $60K rounding difference and attaching the capital call schedule. You read the draft, confirm the figures in 3 minutes, and click send. The knowledge base already has your standard 'how we round fund-level balances in LP letters' explanation stored — the agent pulled it automatically.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

LP email response time (target: same business day for factual questions)

Percentage of LP questions answered without a manual data pull from QuickBooks or Plaid

Time to produce monthly investor update (target: under 2 hours including review)

Capital call reconciliation errors per quarter (target: zero discrepancies between letter figures and portal figures)

Outstanding LP information requests older than 48 hours

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Juniper Square / Addepar

Purpose-built for fund IR reporting at institutional scale, but starts at $50k+/year, assumes a dedicated IR-ops analyst, and doesn't help you answer ad-hoc LP email questions faster — you still do that part manually.

Google Sheets + Gmail + DocSend (current stack)

Free and flexible, but the data is stale the moment you save it, your CFO's version of the commitment tracker diverges from yours within a week, and there's no drafting layer — every LP reply is written from scratch.

HubSpot or Salesforce for investor CRM

Solid contact and pipeline management, but neither system pulls live financial data from QuickBooks or Plaid, so your LP answers still require tab-switching even if your contact records are clean.

ChatGPT or Claude (standalone)

Good at drafting LP reply language once you've already assembled the numbers, but you still have to gather the data yourself — there's no connection to your QuickBooks, Plaid, or Gmail.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — founder inbox, investor reporting, knowledge management 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 replace our fund administrator or our ERP?

No. Starch connects to QuickBooks and NetSuite — syncing your existing financial data on a schedule — and builds surfaces on top of it. Your fund admin keeps doing what they do; Starch just means you stop re-entering their output into a Google Sheet to answer LP questions.

Our LP portal (DocSend, Intralinks, iLevel) doesn't have an API. Can Starch still work with it?

Yes. Starch automates browser-based workflows — no API needed. If you can log into your portal and click through it, Starch can automate it. That includes granting data room access, pulling documents, or checking portal activity.

Will LP emails go out automatically without our review?

Only if you explicitly set it up that way. The default behavior is: Starch drafts, you approve, then it sends. You can add an auto-send rule for specific question categories (e.g., 'data room access confirmations') once you've validated the drafts are reliable. Nothing goes out unsupervised until you decide it should.

Is Starch SOC 2 Type II certified? Our LPs ask about data security.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. That's worth naming honestly if your LPs have formal vendor security requirements. For LP-facing reporting workflows that handle financial data, you should assess this against your own compliance obligations before connecting live QuickBooks or Plaid data.

QuickBooks is listed as a connection — can I pull a P&L directly?

Starch syncs QuickBooks entity-level data on a schedule — invoices, bills, payments, vendors, and journal entries — and you can build a P&L view from that. QuickBooks' native report views (like the formatted P&L report) are temporarily disabled pending a connector fix, but the underlying transaction data syncs normally and is enough to reconstruct the numbers your LPs ask about.

We track LP contacts in a shared Google Sheet and in HubSpot. Which one does Starch use?

Both. Connect HubSpot from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live when your apps run. For the Google Sheet, you can connect Google Sheets from the integration catalog the same way. If you want to consolidate, tell Starch to build you a unified investor CRM that pulls from both sources and deduplicates — you describe what you want, Starch builds the surface.

Can Starch send the monthly investor update directly from our firm's email address, not a Starch address?

Yes. Starch syncs your Gmail account and can send through it. One note: the Gmail OAuth consent screen currently shows the underlying connector name rather than Starch. That's on the roadmap to fix. For most IR use cases this is invisible to LPs since you're the sender, but it's worth knowing.