Finance & FP&A

How to build a 13-week cash flow forecast as Event Agency Founders

Finance & FP&AFor Event Agency Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Your 13-week cash flow forecast lives in a Google Sheet that you update every Sunday night by hand — pulling bank balances from your business checking, chasing your bookkeeper for the QuickBooks export, and manually entering every outstanding vendor invoice, client deposit, and balance due. When a $40,000 corporate gala deposits early or a catering vendor pushes their invoice by two weeks, the whole model shifts and you're rebuilding formulas. You have no fast answer to 'do I have enough to cover payroll, venue deposits, and the AV company this month?' without an hour of reconciliation. The forecast is always slightly stale, and you're always slightly anxious.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Finance & FP&AFor Event Agency Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A rolling 13-week cash flow view that pulls live from your bank accounts and Stripe deposits — updated daily, not on Sunday nights

A scenario layer that lets you model what happens if a $60K corporate contract signs late, or if you hire a second coordinator next quarter

A spending dashboard that flags when a vendor charges more than usual and shows which expense categories are eating into your event margins

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 categories refresh automatically so your forecast reflects what actually cleared, not what you think cleared. Starch also syncs your Stripe data on a schedule to capture client deposit payments and balance-due collections as they come in. No manual uploads, no waiting on your bookkeeper to run a report.

Prompts to copy

Build me a 13-week cash flow forecast using my Plaid bank feeds and Stripe deposits. Show weekly opening balance, expected inflows from client deposits and final payments, and outflows by category — venue, catering, AV, staffing, and overhead. Flag any week where my balance drops below $30,000.

Create three scenarios side by side: one where my Q3 pipeline closes on schedule, one where two corporate contracts slip 45 days, and one where I bring on a second full-time coordinator in August. Show me runway and weekly cash position for each.

Show me a rolling spend dashboard from my Plaid accounts. Group by vendor category — venues, catering, AV, freelance staff, software, and everything else. Alert me if any vendor charges more than 20% above their usual amount, and list every new vendor that's hit my account in the last 60 days.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect your business bank accounts through Plaid — Starch syncs your transactions and balances on a schedule, so the forecast baseline is always current.

2 Connect Stripe so client deposits, balance-due payments, and any online invoice payments flow in automatically alongside your bank data.

3 Open the Runway Analysis starter app and fork it for your agency — tell Starch to reorganize expense categories to match how you actually spend: venue deposits, catering advances, AV vendors, freelance coordinators, and overhead.

4 Prompt Starch to build a 13-week forward view on top of your live data, with weekly rows and a running balance column that turns red when you dip below your chosen floor (e.g., $30,000 operating cushion).

5 Add a section for committed future outflows — tell Starch: 'Add a table where I can enter upcoming vendor payment due dates and amounts; pull these into the weekly outflow column automatically.'

6 Add a section for expected future inflows — tell Starch: 'Add a table for confirmed client contracts with their deposit and balance payment dates so I can see exactly when cash is coming in, even before it hits Stripe.'

7 Open the Scenario Analysis app and set your baseline from the live Plaid and Stripe sync, then build your first scenario: Q3 pipeline closes on schedule.

8 Build a second scenario for pipeline slippage — two large corporate contracts shift 45 days. See what week your balance hits its lowest point and whether you need a credit line.

9 Build a third scenario for a hiring decision — model adding a second full-time coordinator in August and see how many months of runway that leaves given your current event pipeline.

10 Open Transaction Insights and configure vendor-category groupings specific to your agency — venues, catering, AV, freelance staff, subscriptions — so month-over-month spend comparisons actually mean something.

11 Set an anomaly alert in Transaction Insights: 'Flag any vendor charge more than 20% above their 90-day average, and notify me in Slack.' Starch connects to Slack from its integration catalog and the agent queries it live when an alert triggers.

12 Schedule a weekly Slack summary — tell Starch: 'Every Monday at 8am, send me a Slack message with my current cash balance, the lowest balance week in the next 13 weeks, and any anomaly flags from the past 7 days.'

See this running on Starch

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

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Worked example

April–July 2026 Rolling Forecast, Mid-Season Check

Sample numbers from a real run

Opening balance (Apr 14)	87,400
Inflow: corporate gala deposit (Apr 18)	35,000
Outflow: venue advance — June wedding block	-18,500
Outflow: AV vendor invoice due Apr 22	-9,200
Outflow: freelance coordinator x2, April events	-6,400
Outflow: SaaS and software (Aisle Planner, HoneyBook, etc.)	-1,800
Projected closing balance (Apr 28)	86,500
Lowest projected week (week of Jun 2 — heavy venue deposit season)	31,200

It's mid-April and you're tracking 14 active events between now and Labor Day. The Runway Analysis app shows your current balance at $87,400, healthy on its face — but the 13-week view reveals that June 2nd is your tightest week, when three venue advance payments overlap and your next major client deposit (a July 4th corporate picnic) doesn't clear until June 20th. Without the forecast, you'd have approved a $12,000 florals advance for a June wedding without realizing you'd briefly dip to $19,000 — below your $30,000 floor. With the scenario layer, you modeled asking the florals vendor to split the invoice (50% May 30, 50% June 25), which keeps you above floor all summer. Transaction Insights also flagged that your AV vendor charged $9,200 this month versus their usual $7,400 — turns out they added a line item for generator rental you hadn't approved. You caught it before paying.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Lowest projected weekly cash balance over the next 13 weeks (your 'floor week')

Days until next cash crunch — weeks where balance drops below your operating cushion

Client deposit collection rate: % of confirmed contracts with deposits received on time

Vendor advance exposure: total committed outflows due in the next 30 days against current balance

Month-over-month variance by spend category (venue, catering, AV, staffing, overhead)

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Sheets (manual)

Infinitely flexible but always stale — you're spending 2-3 hours a week on data entry instead of selling events, and one missed vendor invoice makes the whole model wrong.

QuickBooks cash flow report

Reflects what's already happened, not what's coming — it can't show you that June 2nd is your tightest week until June 2nd has already passed.

Float or Dryrun (dedicated cash flow tools)

Purpose-built for cash flow forecasting and solid, but they don't let you describe your agency's specific categories and alert logic in plain English or build adjacent views (scenario modeling, spend anomalies) in the same place.

HoneyBook or Dubsado reporting

Shows you what clients owe you but has no visibility into your bank balance, vendor outflows, or what happens to cash if two contracts slip — it's a receivables view, not a cash flow view.

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 connect to HoneyBook or Dubsado to pull in my client contracts and payment schedules?

HoneyBook and Dubsado aren't in Starch's scheduled-sync list, but both are web-based platforms. Starch can automate them through your browser — no API needed — to pull outstanding invoice data or payment schedules into your forecast. You can also connect either app from Starch's integration catalog of 3,000+ apps if a live query connector exists; the agent queries it when your dashboard runs. For most event agency founders, the fastest path is manually entering confirmed contract payment dates into a Starch table that feeds the forecast — it takes 5 minutes and only needs updating when you sign a new contract.

My revenue is lumpy — big deposits, then nothing, then a big balance payment. Will the forecast handle that?

Yes, and this is exactly what the 13-week weekly view is built for. Starch shows you cash by week, not by month, so you can see the gap between when your venue deposit is due and when the client's balance payment clears. You tell Starch to pull Stripe payment dates and add a table for upcoming expected payments, and the weekly forecast reflects the actual timing — not a smoothed monthly average that hides your tightest weeks.

I use Plaid but my main operating account is at a small regional bank. Will it connect?

Plaid supports thousands of financial institutions, including most regional banks and credit unions. If your specific bank isn't supported by Plaid, Starch can't sync it automatically — that's an honest limit. In that case, you'd have the option to export transactions manually and import them, or track that account's balance in a Starch table you update weekly.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I sometimes handle financial data for large corporate clients who ask about this.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your corporate clients require that certification for any vendor who touches financial data, that's worth knowing upfront. Starch is built for operator founders and small agencies, not enterprise compliance environments.

Can Starch pull my QuickBooks data to get vendor bills into the forecast?

Yes — Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule, including bills, invoices, vendors, and payments (up to 50,000 records per entity). One current limit: QuickBooks report views like the P&L summary or Transaction List are temporarily unavailable due to an upstream connector fix in progress. Entity-level data — individual bills and vendor records — syncs normally, which is what the cash flow forecast needs.

What happens if I want to model a scenario where I take on a big anchor client that changes my whole cost structure?

Open the Scenario Analysis app and tell Starch what changed: 'Add a scenario where I bring on a retainer client worth $25,000 a month starting in September, and I hire one additional full-time coordinator at $58,000 annual salary to service them. Show me runway and weekly cash position.' Starch builds the model on top of your live Plaid and Stripe baseline — you're only adjusting the assumptions you want to test, not rebuilding the whole thing from scratch.