Finance & FP&A

How to build a monthly board financial pack as Chief of Staff and Founder's Office

Finance & FP&AFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Every quarter, you spend the week before a board meeting doing the same exhausting data archaeology: pinging the CFO for a QuickBooks export, pulling a HubSpot pipeline snapshot, asking the finance analyst for the Stripe MRR number (which never matches the one in the deck from last time), and then manually stitching it all into a Google Slides template someone built two CEOs ago. You are simultaneously the person who notices when the gross margin line is wrong and the person who has to fix it at 11pm. The board pack is never done — it's just abandoned. You've probably rebuilt the same burn rate table four times this year in four different spreadsheets.

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Finance & FP&AFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live financial dashboard that pulls burn rate, runway, and MRR directly from Plaid, Stripe, and QuickBooks — updated on a schedule so the numbers in the board pack are never stale by the time you send it

An automated investor-grade narrative generator that drafts the financial commentary, top wins, key risks, and competitive context based on the actual data — not your memory of what happened this month

A repeatable monthly workflow that produces a board-ready financial pack in under two hours instead of two days, without touching a spreadsheet or chasing anyone for a data export

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 Investor Reporting

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Plaid bank feed, Stripe charges and subscriptions, and QuickBooks invoices, bills, vendors, and journal entries on a schedule — so the numbers in your dashboard are always current without manual exports. HubSpot is connected from Starch's integration catalog and queried live when your app needs pipeline data. The Investor Reporting app wires all three financial sources together and handles the narrative generation and formatting on your chosen cadence.

Prompts to copy

Build me a board financial pack dashboard that shows net burn by month for the last 6 months, current runway in months, MRR and MRR growth rate, gross margin, and headcount cost as a percentage of total burn. Pull from Plaid for expenses and bank balance, Stripe for revenue, and QuickBooks for payroll and vendor invoices. Add a 12-month forward cash projection based on our current burn trajectory.

Every month on the 5th, generate a board financial narrative that summarizes the prior month's burn, revenue, and runway, flags any expense categories that moved more than 15% month-over-month, and drafts a 3-paragraph CFO commentary I can edit before the board meeting. Format it consistently with the tone from the previous month's pack.

Create an investor reporting app that pulls our latest Stripe MRR, Plaid net burn, and QuickBooks expense breakdown, adds context about what drove the numbers this month, and produces a board-pack-ready financial summary with a chart of MRR growth and a runway projection table.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Plaid in Starch so your bank transactions and balances sync automatically — this is the expense and burn source of truth that most board packs currently get wrong because someone exported a CSV on the wrong day.

2 Connect Stripe so revenue, MRR, subscription counts, and churn data sync on a schedule — Starch pulls charges, invoices, and payouts so the revenue line in your board pack matches what's actually in the bank.

3 Connect QuickBooks so Starch syncs your invoices, bills, vendor payments, and journal entries — this gives you payroll costs, vendor expenses, and accruals without waiting for the bookkeeper to close the month.

4 Open the Runway Analysis starter app from the Starch App Store and customize it for your company's board format — add the expense categories your board actually asks about (R&D vs. S&M vs. G&A) and set the forward projection horizon to 24 months.

5 Tell Starch what your board cares about: describe the specific KPIs, breakdowns, and comparisons you want — for example, 'add a headcount cost as a percent of total burn line and a gross margin trend chart' — and Starch updates the dashboard without any code.

6 Open the Investor Reporting starter app and configure the narrative cadence — set it to run on the 5th of each month so you have a draft financial commentary in your inbox before you start building the deck.

7 Give Starch a sample of your prior board narrative so it can match your tone — paste in last quarter's CFO commentary and tell it 'write future summaries in this style, direct and data-led, no fluff.'

8 Connect HubSpot from Starch's integration catalog so the board pack can include a pipeline snapshot — ARR weighted by stage, deals closing this quarter, and pipeline coverage ratio — pulled live at report-generation time.

9 Set up a monthly automation: on the 3rd of each month, Starch pulls the prior month's financials, runs the narrative generator, and sends you a draft board financial pack — burn, runway, MRR, gross margin, pipeline, and CFO commentary — for your review and edits.

10 Review the draft, make your edits in plain language ('adjust the risk section to mention the new enterprise sales hire we're making'), and export the final pack to share with the board or feed into your slide deck.

11 After the board meeting, tell Starch what questions the board asked so it can flag those data points proactively in next month's pack — over time the pack gets smarter about what your specific board focuses on.

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

March 2026 Board Pack Close — Series B prep cycle

Sample numbers from a real run

Net burn (March)	387,000
Ending cash balance (Plaid)	4,820,000
Runway at current burn	12
MRR (Stripe, March 31)	284,000
MRR growth MoM	6
Gross margin	71
Payroll as % of burn (QuickBooks)	68
Pipeline (HubSpot, Q2 weighted)	1,940,000

It's April 3rd. In previous cycles you would have spent this week sending Slack messages to the CFO, the head of sales, and the finance analyst, reconciling three different MRR numbers (Stripe dashboard, QuickBooks, and the one the CEO remembered from a call last week), and building a burn table in Google Sheets that would be wrong by the time you finished. This time, Starch ran on the 3rd as scheduled. It pulled March's Plaid bank transactions, calculated net burn at $387K against a $4.82M cash balance, and surfaced 12 months of runway — flagging that burn increased 14% MoM because of the two engineering hires that closed mid-March, which QuickBooks picked up through payroll entries. Stripe showed MRR at $284K, up 6% from February, with gross margin holding at 71%. The Investor Reporting app drafted the CFO commentary in the tone of your Q4 2025 update: direct, no spin, with a one-paragraph risk section noting that the pipeline coverage ratio at 2.3x gives you 90 days to close enough Q2 deals before burn becomes a board conversation. HubSpot's live pipeline query added the $1.94M weighted Q2 pipeline number. You spent 45 minutes editing the draft, not building it. The board got the pack 48 hours before the meeting for the first time this year.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Net burn rate and MoM variance — the single number your board will ask first

Runway in months at current burn, updated monthly from live bank data

MRR and MRR growth rate, reconciled to Stripe so it matches what the CEO said on the last investor call

Payroll and headcount cost as a percentage of total burn — critical for a 150-person company approaching Series B scrutiny

Weighted pipeline coverage ratio from HubSpot, expressed as a multiple of quarterly revenue target

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Sheets + manual exports

You control every cell but you're also responsible for every cell — one wrong paste from a QuickBooks export breaks the model, and it will happen the day before the board meeting.

Mosaic or Pigment (dedicated FP&A platforms)

Powerful for finance teams that want a dedicated modeling environment, but they require a CFO or analyst to own them — not something a chief of staff picks up and runs solo, and they don't handle the narrative or investor-update layer.

Notion + manual data entry

Good for the doc layer and board-meeting notes, but Notion has no native financial data connections — you still have to copy numbers from QuickBooks and Stripe into it by hand every month.

Existing BI tool (Looker, Metabase, whatever the last analyst set up)

Often has the right charts but requires someone who knows SQL to change anything, and it almost certainly doesn't have the narrative or investor-reporting layer — so you still end up writing the board commentary from scratch.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — runway analysis, 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

Will the QuickBooks data actually be current, or is there a lag?

Starch syncs QuickBooks on a schedule and pulls entity-level data — invoices, bills, vendor payments, journal entries, and payroll. One honest caveat: QuickBooks report views like the P&L summary are temporarily disabled pending an upstream fix. Starch pulls the underlying entity data instead, which is the same raw numbers — your board pack won't have a gap, but if you're used to the formatted P&L view specifically, know that it comes from entities rather than the canned report for now.

We use Xero, not QuickBooks. Can Starch connect to it?

Yes. Connect Xero from Starch's integration catalog and the agent queries it live when your financial app runs. It won't have the same scheduled-sync depth as QuickBooks, but for most board pack use cases — pulling current balances, invoices, and expense categories — the live query is sufficient.

I don't want to expose our bank data. How does Starch handle Plaid credentials?

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified yet — that's on the roadmap and worth knowing upfront. Plaid connects through its standard OAuth flow, the same one your accounting software uses. If your company's security policy requires SOC 2 Type II for any tool that touches financial data, Starch isn't there yet and you should wait or run it in a read-only sandbox setup with non-production accounts.

Can Starch pull the HubSpot pipeline data and include it in the same board pack?

Yes. Connect HubSpot from Starch's integration catalog — Starch queries it live when your board pack app runs, so the pipeline snapshot reflects the moment of generation. You can tell Starch exactly what you want: 'show weighted pipeline by stage, deals expected to close this quarter, and our coverage ratio against the revenue target.'

The CEO wants slides, not a dashboard. Can Starch produce a board deck?

A Presentation Agent app is currently in development — it will build polished slide decks from a text description of your board update. Request beta access to get notified when it launches. In the meantime, the investor reporting app produces a structured narrative and data summary that you can paste into your slide template in under 30 minutes — most chiefs of staff find that's faster than starting from a blank deck.

What if I want to add a metric that isn't in the default Runway Analysis template?

Tell Starch what you want in plain language. The App Store template is a starting point — you can describe any additional metric, chart, or data cut and Starch adds it without code. For example: 'Add a line showing engineering headcount cost as a percentage of total burn, pulled from QuickBooks payroll entries, compared to the industry benchmark of 45%.'

Our Stripe MRR number never matches our QuickBooks revenue. Will Starch make this worse?

Starch pulls both sources independently and can show them side by side so the discrepancy is visible rather than hidden. It won't reconcile them automatically — that's an accounting judgment call about timing, recognition, and refund treatment. But having both numbers on the same screen, pulled from live data, is actually better than what most board packs show, which is one number from whichever system someone happened to export last.