Finance & FP&A

How to build a 13-week cash flow forecast as Asset Management Founders

Finance & FP&AFor Asset Management Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You're managing a rolling 13-week cash flow forecast in a spreadsheet that you built yourself, pulling numbers manually from your fund's operating account, your Stripe billing (if you charge management fees that way), and whatever QuickBooks your bookkeeper updates once a month — usually two weeks after the period closes. By the time you have clean numbers, the forecast is already stale. Large funds use treasury systems with dedicated ops staff; you're doing this at 11pm before an LP call. When something unusual hits — a wire for a new service provider, a delayed capital call receipt — you don't catch it until you reconcile, which means your cash position is always slightly fictional.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Finance & FP&AFor Asset Management Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live 13-week cash flow forecast that pulls from your actual operating bank accounts via Plaid and updates daily — no manual uploads, no waiting for your bookkeeper

A side-by-side scenario view showing how your fund operating runway changes if a large LP is delayed, management fees come in below target, or you hire an analyst earlier than planned

An automated transaction monitor that flags unusual vendor charges, new payees, and month-over-month spending shifts before they hit your quarterly LP report

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

Runway Analysis Scenario Analysis Transaction Insights

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Plaid bank account data on a schedule — transactions, balances, and categorized outflows update daily and live in Starch's database powering all three apps. Starch also syncs your Stripe data on a schedule if management fees flow through Stripe invoices. No manual exports, no bookkeeper dependency for the live forecast view.

Prompts to copy

Build me a 13-week cash flow forecast for my fund's operating account. Pull transactions from Plaid, categorize outflows into management fees received, payroll, fund admin, legal, and office. Show me projected ending cash balance each week for the next 13 weeks based on actual burn over the last 90 days.

Create a scenario analysis that shows three cases for my fund's operating runway: base case (fees on schedule), delayed case (largest LP delays $200k capital call by 60 days), and lean case (I cut admin and software spend by 30%). Show runway impact and break-even under each.

Set up a spending monitor on my Plaid-connected accounts. Flag any transaction over $5,000 from a vendor I haven't paid before, alert me if any recurring subscription amount changes by more than 20%, and give me a weekly summary of new vendors added in the last 7 days.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect your fund's operating bank account via Plaid — Starch syncs your transactions and balances on a schedule, so the forecast always reflects the most recent cleared activity.

2 If you invoice management fees through Stripe, connect Stripe as well — Starch syncs charge and invoice data on a schedule so fee receipts appear in your cash flow as they clear, not when your bookkeeper enters them.

3 Open the Runway Analysis starter app from the App Store and fork it for your fund context — rename categories to match how you actually classify fund operating spend (fund admin, audit, legal, custodian, GP payroll).

4 Tell Starch how to classify your inflows: 'Management fee receipts are Stripe invoices tagged with the 'mgmt-fee' product; LP capital contributions are ACH credits over $50,000 from counterparties in my contacts list.' The agent builds the classification rules from your description.

5 Build the 13-week weekly view by typing your prompt — Starch constructs a rolling forward projection using your trailing 90-day average burn, broken out by expense category, with week-by-week cash balance.

6 Add the Scenario Analysis app and connect it to the same Plaid and Stripe data. Set up your three scenarios: base case, delayed capital call, and lean ops. You type the assumptions; Starch models the runway impact.

7 Use the scenario output to set a hard floor: the week when any scenario drops below your minimum cash reserve (e.g., 2 months of payroll + fund admin). That date becomes your fundraising or fee-notice trigger.

8 Add Transaction Insights and configure the anomaly thresholds that matter to you: new payees over $5,000, subscription amount changes above 20%, any wire over $25,000. This catches things the forecast doesn't — one-off charges that aren't yet in the run rate.

9 Schedule a weekly Starch automation to compile the 13-week forecast, the active scenario comparison, and the anomaly flag list into a single summary — sent to your Slack or email every Monday morning before markets open.

10 Before each quarterly LP report, pull the actual vs. forecast variance for the prior 13 weeks directly from Starch — no reconciliation sprint, because the data was live the whole time.

11 If your fund admin or auditor needs the underlying transaction detail, export from Starch or pipe it to Google Sheets via Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live and writes the data.

12 As the fund matures and you onboard a CFO or controller, share the Starch apps with them — they inherit a working system, not a fragile personal spreadsheet.

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

Q2 2026 Operating Cash Review — May Week 3

Sample numbers from a real run

Operating account (Plaid, Chase)	487,200
Management fees received YTD (Stripe)	312,000
Fund admin & accounting (recurring)	-84,000
Legal & compliance (QTD)	-41,500
GP payroll (2 people, QTD)	-96,000
Software & data subscriptions	-18,700
Travel & LP meeting costs	-22,400
Projected 13-week ending cash (base case)	319,600
Projected 13-week ending cash (delayed LP scenario)	119,600

In the week-3 May review, Starch's Runway Analysis app shows $487,200 in the operating account with $312,000 in management fees cleared through Stripe YTD. Base-case burn is running $64,200 per month — slightly above the $58,000 quarterly plan due to a $22,400 travel line that spiked around the LP annual meeting. The 13-week base-case projection shows $319,600 ending cash, which is comfortable above the $200,000 minimum reserve floor. But the Scenario Analysis tells a different story: the 'delayed LP' scenario — modeling a 60-day delay on a $200,000 capital call from a single anchor LP — drops projected 13-week cash to $119,600, below the reserve floor by week 9. That's the trigger: you send the capital call notice this week instead of waiting until month-end. Transaction Insights also flagged a new $7,400 charge from a legal vendor not in the prior payee list — turns out it's a one-time restructuring opinion, not a recurring engagement, but it would have been invisible until the next bookkeeper close without the anomaly alert.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Fund operating runway in weeks (cash balance ÷ weekly burn rate, updated daily)

Management fee collection rate: fees invoiced vs. fees received as a % within 30 days

13-week forecast accuracy: projected vs. actual ending cash balance, measured weekly

Days to stale data: how many days since the last clean cash position — target is zero with live Plaid sync

Scenario gap: difference in 13-week ending cash between base case and worst-case LP delay scenario

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Excel or Google Sheets (manual build)

Full control over model logic, but your numbers are only as fresh as the last time you manually pulled a bank export — which for most solo GPs is weekly at best, often monthly.

Juniper Square or Addepar

Purpose-built for fund accounting and LP reporting, but priced for established funds with ops teams — $50k+ per year and a multi-month implementation you don't have bandwidth for as an emerging manager.

QuickBooks (waiting on bookkeeper close)

Solid for GAAP-compliant books, but you're always looking at last month's actuals — it's a reporting tool, not a live cash visibility tool, and it won't project forward without manual work.

Causal or Mosaic

Thoughtful financial modeling tools designed for startup CFOs, but they assume a dedicated finance hire to build and maintain the models — and they don't have the LP relationship and fund-specific workflow context Starch covers in the same platform.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — runway analysis, scenario planning, transaction insights 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 store my bank transaction data, or does it query it fresh each time?

Starch syncs your Plaid transaction and balance data on a schedule and stores it in Starch's database. That's what makes the daily-updated forecast possible — the app doesn't need to re-fetch every time you open it. The trade-off is that Starch is a live data surface, not a long-horizon data warehouse. If you need five years of archived transaction history for an audit, you'd export from your bank or QuickBooks directly.

My management fees go through wire transfer, not Stripe. Can Starch still track fee receipts?

Yes. Plaid picks up wire credits hitting your operating account. You tell Starch how to classify them — for example, 'ACH or wire credits over $50,000 from any counterparty are management fee receipts' — and the agent applies that rule going forward. You don't need Stripe for this to work; Stripe just gives you invoice-level detail if you bill that way.

Can I share this forecast view with my fund administrator or outside CFO?

Yes. You can share Starch apps with collaborators. They see the live data and can interact with the apps you've built. They can't change your bank connection credentials, but they can read the forecast, run scenarios, and export data.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? My LP compliance questionnaire is going to ask.

Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified — that's worth knowing before you route sensitive fund data through it. If your LPs require SOC 2 Type II for all technology vendors, that's a real constraint. Plaid itself is SOC 2 certified, but Starch as the platform is not yet.

What if my fund operates on QuickBooks for the formal books? Can Starch pull from there too?

Yes. Starch syncs directly from QuickBooks — invoices, bills, vendors, payments, and journal entries update on a schedule. One honest caveat: QuickBooks' P&L and Transaction List report views are temporarily unavailable due to an upstream connector issue. Entity-level data (the individual bills and invoices that make up your cash flow) syncs normally. For a 13-week cash forecast, entity-level data is what you actually need — the formatted report views are less important.

I don't have Stripe — I don't charge management fees that way. Do I need it?

No. Plaid alone is sufficient for the 13-week cash flow forecast. Stripe adds value if your fee receipts are already flowing through it, because you get invoice-level detail (which LP paid, which fund, which quarter). If you collect fees by wire or check, Plaid captures the cash movement and you classify it in Starch.