Finance & FP&A

How to build a 13-week cash flow forecast as Small Finance Teams

Finance & FP&AFor Small Finance Teams2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Every Friday afternoon, one of your three people rebuilds the 13-week cash flow forecast from scratch in Google Sheets. They export a QuickBooks or NetSuite P&L, pull the Stripe dashboard for revenue, download a Plaid or bank CSV for actual cash, and hand-stitch them together with VLOOKUP formulas that break when a vendor name changes by one character. The model is already 48 hours stale by the time the CFO opens it Monday morning. When a board member asks 'what does week 9 look like if we delay the enterprise deal by two weeks?' you're rebuilding the whole thing again mid-week, which is the same week as close.

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Finance & FP&AFor Small Finance Teams2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live 13-week cash flow model that pulls actual bank balances from Plaid, revenue from Stripe, and AP/AR from QuickBooks or NetSuite on a schedule — so Friday's forecast is already built before you sit down

Side-by-side scenario views that let you swap one assumption (hiring freeze, delayed deal, slower collections) and instantly see the cash impact across all 13 weeks without rebuilding the base model

Automated weekly cash position snapshots that land in Slack every Monday morning, so the CFO has the answer before they ask the question

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

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Plaid bank transaction and balance data on a schedule for the cash position layer. Starch connects directly to Stripe on a schedule for weekly revenue actuals. Starch connects directly to QuickBooks on a schedule for AP aging, AR balances, and open invoice data (bills, invoices, payments, and vendors all sync — note that QuickBooks P&L report views are temporarily unavailable, but entity-level data syncs normally). Starch connects directly to NetSuite on a schedule if that is your ERP instead of QuickBooks. Slack is connected from Starch's integration catalog for the Monday morning digest automation.

Prompts to copy

Build a 13-week cash flow forecast using my Plaid bank transactions and balances as the starting cash position, Stripe for weekly revenue actuals, and QuickBooks for AP and AR balances. Show beginning cash, operating inflows, operating outflows, and ending cash for each of the next 13 weeks. Flag any week where ending cash drops below $500,000.

Create a scenario analysis on top of my 13-week cash forecast with three scenarios: base case, a version where our enterprise pipeline closes 3 weeks late, and a version where we add two engineering hires in week 4. Show ending cash in week 13 and the week where cash is lowest for each scenario side by side.

Every Monday at 7am, post a Slack message to #finance-weekly with this week's starting cash balance from Plaid, projected ending cash in week 13 under the base case, and the week number where cash is tightest. Include a one-line flag if any scenario shows us below the $500k threshold.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Plaid in Starch — Starch syncs your bank accounts and transaction data on a schedule, which becomes the opening cash balance and the actual-vs-forecast reconciliation layer for the model.

2 Connect Stripe in Starch — Starch syncs charges, invoices, and payouts on a schedule so week-by-week revenue actuals flow into the forecast without a manual export.

3 Connect QuickBooks or NetSuite — Starch syncs AP invoices, bills, vendor payments, and AR balances on a schedule. This is what populates the outflow side of each week: known payables, payroll timing from your pay schedule, and expected collections from open invoices.

4 Open the Runway Analysis starter app from the Starch App Store as your base template — it already wires Plaid and Stripe together, so you are not starting from a blank canvas. Fork it and extend it for a 13-week weekly view rather than a monthly runway number.

5 Describe the forecast structure you want in plain language: tell Starch to organize cash flows by week, distinguish between operating inflows (collections, Stripe revenue) and operating outflows (payroll, AP payments, recurring SaaS), and calculate beginning and ending cash for each of the 13 weeks.

6 Add your known fixed obligations that do not live in QuickBooks yet — lease payments, loan amortization, committed contractor invoices — by telling Starch to include them as recurring line items at the amounts and cadences you specify.

7 Open the Scenario Analysis starter app and layer it on top of your base forecast. Tell Starch which assumptions you want to be toggleable: deal close date, headcount adds, collection cycle length. Each scenario adjusts only those variables and inherits everything else from your base model.

8 Set a threshold alert: tell Starch to flag any week in any scenario where ending cash drops below your minimum operating balance (e.g., $500,000 or two months of burn), and surface that flag in the dashboard header so it is impossible to miss.

9 Build the Monday Slack automation: tell Starch to run every Monday at 7am, pull the current week's Plaid balance as the opening figure, run the 13-week projection under base case assumptions, and post a summary to your #finance-weekly Slack channel including starting cash, week-13 ending cash, and the tightest week.

10 Add a variance tab: tell Starch to compare last week's forecast for this week against this week's actual Plaid transactions and Stripe payouts, and show you where the model was off and by how much. This is the feedback loop that sharpens the forecast over time.

11 Share a read-only view of the live dashboard with your CFO and one board member so ad hoc questions ('what does week 9 look like if the deal slips?') get answered by the model rather than by you rebuilding a spreadsheet.

12 At the end of each month, tell Starch to generate a one-page cash flow narrative summarizing the 13-week actual-vs-forecast variance, the current scenario outputs, and the key assumptions — ready to paste into the board deck without manual reformatting.

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

Week of April 14, 2026 — Q2 Forecast Refresh

Sample numbers from a real run

Opening cash (Plaid — April 14)	2,847,000
Week 1 Stripe collections	312,000
Week 1 AP payments (QuickBooks open bills)	-187,000
Week 1 payroll (scheduled)	-224,000
Week 1 ending cash	2,748,000
Week 6 projected ending cash — base case	1,920,000
Week 6 projected ending cash — delayed enterprise deal (3 weeks)	1,540,000
Week 13 projected ending cash — base case	1,105,000
Week 13 projected ending cash — delayed deal + 2 hires	623,000

It is Thursday April 10. The head of finance at a 200-person B2B SaaS company used to spend four hours every Friday pulling this together manually. This week, Starch already has it built. Plaid shows $2,847,000 in the operating account as of Monday morning. Stripe has synced $312,000 in collections for the week. QuickBooks has $187,000 in open bills due this week across six vendors. Payroll runs Friday for $224,000. Week 1 ending cash: $2,748,000. The model runs forward 13 weeks using QuickBooks AR aging to project collections — $890,000 in open invoices with an average 34-day collection cycle — and the AP schedule for known outflows. Under the base case, week 13 ending cash is $1,105,000, which is above the $500,000 floor. But the Scenario Analysis tab shows the problem: if the $280,000 enterprise deal that was supposed to close in week 4 slips to week 7, and the team adds two engineers at $18,000 per month combined starting in week 4, week 13 ending cash falls to $623,000. Still above floor, but week 11 hits $487,000 — below the threshold. Starch flags week 11 in red in the dashboard header. The CFO gets the Monday Slack message showing that flag before the 9am leadership meeting, asks the right question about deal timing, and the finance team spends zero hours that Friday rebuilding a spreadsheet.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Week-13 ending cash under each active scenario (base, upside, downside)

Forecast-vs-actual variance by week: difference between last week's projected cash and this week's actual Plaid balance

Days until cash drops below operating floor ($500k or equivalent) under the downside scenario

AP days outstanding vs. cash outflow pacing: are vendor payments running ahead of or behind the model

AR collection cycle actual vs. assumed: if you modeled 34-day collections and actuals are running 42, the forecast is wrong and the model should tell you

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Sheets built from scratch each week

Gives you full control but requires four to six hours of manual export, paste, and formula work every week, breaks when source data format changes, and produces a static file that is wrong by Monday morning.

Mosaic or Cube (FP&A platforms)

Purpose-built for 13-week cash modeling and board reporting, but priced for 10-person finance teams — typically $24,000–$60,000/year — and require multi-week implementation and a dedicated admin.

QuickBooks or NetSuite native cash flow reports

Gives you an ERP-sourced view but is backward-looking, does not incorporate Stripe or Plaid data, and cannot model scenarios or produce a true 13-week forward projection.

Excel with direct ERP data connectors

More automatable than Sheets for ERP pulls, but still requires a skilled FP&A analyst to maintain the model, does not natively connect to Stripe or Plaid, and produces a file rather than a live shareable dashboard.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — runway analysis, scenario planning 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

QuickBooks has a P&L report view — can Starch use that for the outflow side of the forecast?

Not right now. QuickBooks P&L report views are temporarily unavailable in Starch pending an upstream fix. The good news is that entity-level data — bills, invoices, vendor payments, and journal entries — all sync normally on a schedule, so the outflow side of your 13-week model is built from actual AP records, not a summarized report. In practice this is more accurate for a cash flow forecast anyway, since you want to know which specific invoices are due in which weeks, not just a monthly expense total.

Does Starch store my bank and Stripe data, or does it query live every time?

Plaid, Stripe, QuickBooks, and NetSuite are all scheduled-sync providers — Starch syncs that data on a schedule and stores it in Starch's database. This means your 13-week model loads instantly from a local copy rather than waiting for live API calls each time. The tradeoff is that data reflects the last sync, not the second you open the dashboard. For a weekly cash forecast, this is exactly the right behavior.

We use Ramp and Bill.com for AP approvals. Can those feed into the forecast?

Ramp and Bill.com are both reachable from Starch's integration catalog of 3,000+ apps, where the agent queries them live when your app runs. If you want AP data from those sources in the forecast, tell Starch to pull open bills and payment status from whichever one you use as the system of record. If you find the live-query approach too slow for your needs, you can also tell Starch to automate Bill.com through your browser — no formal API connector required.

Is the data in Starch secure enough for bank account and revenue data?

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today — that is worth knowing if your company has a vendor security review process that requires it. If you are a 200-person company with a formal security review, you will want to flag that to your IT or security team before connecting Plaid and Stripe. Starch is transparent about this rather than glossing over it.

Our CFO wants to give a board member read-only access to the forecast. Can we do that without them seeing all of Starch?

Yes. You can share a view of a specific Starch app — the 13-week cash model — without giving the board member access to your full Starch workspace or all connected data sources.

We are on NetSuite, not QuickBooks. Does everything here still apply?

Yes. Starch connects directly to NetSuite on a schedule and syncs invoices, expenses, journal entries, balance sheet, and income statement data. The 13-week model recipe works the same way with NetSuite as the AP/AR source instead of QuickBooks. The Investor Reporting starter app in the Starch App Store also uses NetSuite if you want a second surface for board reporting alongside the cash forecast.

How long does it take to go from 'nothing set up' to a working live 13-week forecast?

Connecting Plaid, Stripe, and QuickBooks or NetSuite takes 15 to 30 minutes of OAuth and permission setup. The Runway Analysis starter app is immediately functional once those connections sync. Describing the 13-week weekly structure, the scenario toggles, and the Slack automation to Starch in natural language takes another 30 to 60 minutes. You are unlikely to have a fully tuned model with all your specific fixed obligations and threshold alerts in under two hours, but you will have a live working forecast faster than you can build a fresh Google Sheets model from scratch.