Finance & FP&A

How to build a monthly board financial pack as DTC Brand Founders

Finance & FP&AFor DTC Brand Founders2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

You promised your seed investors a monthly board pack. Three months in, you're still building it in Google Slides at 11pm the Sunday before the Monday call. Your Shopify revenue lives in one tab, your Meta and TikTok spend in another, your Plaid transactions in a third, and your COGS estimate is a number your ops person texted you. Nobody agreed on whether to use gross revenue or net-of-returns. You spend two hours chasing the right burn number, then another hour making the slide look like you have your act together. Next month you do it again. The pack is always late, always inconsistent, and always built from scratch.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Finance & FP&AFor DTC Brand Founders2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live financial dashboard that pulls Plaid bank transactions and Stripe revenue on a schedule — so your burn rate, cash runway, and net revenue are current before you open the deck

An Investor Reporting app that drafts your monthly board narrative — burn, runway, MRR or GMV growth, top wins, and risks — consistent with the tone you used last time

A repeatable monthly workflow where you spend 20 minutes reviewing and editing instead of four hours assembling

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 and Stripe charges, customers, and subscriptions on a schedule — data refreshes daily so your numbers are current when the app runs. Shopify and Meta Ads can be connected from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries them live when your dashboard or report needs them. Any platform without a direct API — TikTok Ads reporting pages, freight carrier portals — Starch automates through your browser, no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Build me a runway dashboard that shows net burn using Plaid transactions and Stripe revenue, broken down by category (ad spend, COGS, fulfillment, payroll, software), with a 24-month cash projection and a 6-month trend line. Flag any month where burn is more than 15% above the prior month.

Every month on the 3rd, pull my Stripe GMV, Plaid net burn, and cash balance, then draft a board update that covers: revenue vs last month and vs plan, burn and runway, top 3 wins, top 2 risks, and one ask. Match the tone of last month's update. Email it to my investor list as a draft for my review before sending.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Plaid from Starch's scheduled-sync integration — your bank and credit card transactions sync daily, categorized. This is your ground-truth burn number, not your bookkeeper's 30-day-late close.

2 Connect Stripe from Starch's scheduled-sync integration — charges, subscriptions, and payouts sync on the same schedule. For DTC brands on net-30 payment terms or with subscription boxes, this gives you recognized revenue vs. gross orders separately.

3 Connect Shopify from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live to pull GMV, order volume, return rate, and AOV whenever your board pack runs. No separate export needed.

4 Connect Meta Ads from Starch's integration catalog — live-query your spend, impressions, and ROAS by campaign so your CAC calculation uses real ad spend, not a screenshot from Ads Manager.

5 Start with the Runway Analysis app from the App Store. Fork it to add your DTC-specific expense buckets: paid acquisition, fulfillment and 3PL fees, COGS, and SaaS tools. Tell Starch which Plaid categories map to each.

6 Describe your board pack format in plain language. Something like: 'My board wants GMV, net revenue after returns, gross margin, CAC, LTV, burn, and runway on page one, with a narrative on what happened and what I'm watching.' Starch builds the structure.

7 Start the Investor Reporting app from the App Store. Tell it your investor list, your preferred send cadence (monthly, on the 3rd), and give it one previous update to use as a tone reference — it will stay consistent month over month.

8 On close day, review the auto-drafted narrative. The numbers pulled from Plaid and Stripe are already in. You add color: the campaign that drove the spike, the 3PL delay that hurt margin, the reorder you moved up.

9 For any data that doesn't have a direct API — your TikTok Shop dashboard, a freight broker's portal, a wholesale buyer's order portal — tell Starch to pull it through browser automation. It logs in, navigates the page, and extracts the numbers into your pack.

10 Set a Slack alert via Starch's scheduled-sync Slack connection: if net burn in any 7-day rolling window exceeds your monthly plan by more than 20%, ping you directly. You catch cost overruns before the board does.

11 Each month, your board pack draft lands in your inbox three days before the meeting. You spend 20 minutes editing the narrative, hit send, and move on. The numbers are the same source of truth your CFO or bookkeeper will confirm when they close the month.

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

March 2026 board pack — DTC skincare brand, post-Q1 close

Sample numbers from a real run

Gross GMV (Shopify)	312,000
Returns & chargebacks	-24,800
Net revenue	287,200
COGS (Plaid — 3PL + manufacturing)	-115,000
Gross profit	172,200
Paid acquisition (Meta + TikTok)	-89,000
Payroll	-38,000
SaaS & tools	-9,400
Fulfillment overages (Q1 peak)	-7,200
Net burn (Plaid verified)	-52,400
Cash balance (Plaid)	614,000
Runway at current burn	11.7

Starch pulled Shopify GMV of $312K for March — up 18% from February's $264K — but the return rate on the new SPF SKU launched in late February came in at 9.1%, dragging net revenue to $287K. COGS were $115K; the 3PL is billing a per-pick overcharge that started showing up in Plaid transactions on March 8th, which Starch flagged automatically as a 22% week-over-week cost spike. Gross margin held at 59.9% despite the overcharge. Paid acquisition was $89K — Meta ROAS was 2.1x, TikTok was 3.4x, so the draft narrative Starch wrote recommended shifting $15K of April budget toward TikTok. Net burn was $52.4K, verified against the Plaid bank feed. Cash is $614K, giving 11.7 months of runway at current pace. The board draft was in the founder's inbox on April 3rd; she spent 18 minutes adding a note about the 3PL contract renegotiation and sent it. The prior month's pack had taken her four hours.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Net burn vs. plan (Plaid-verified, not bookkeeper estimate)

Blended CAC by channel (Meta spend + TikTok spend divided by new customers from Shopify)

Gross margin after returns and 3PL fees — not just COGS

Cash runway in months at trailing 90-day burn rate

Return rate by SKU — because one bad product launch can swing your net revenue 5-8 points

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Slides + manual exports

Full control over design, but you rebuild from scratch every month — no live data pull, no draft narrative, and the numbers are only as current as whoever last exported the CSV.

Notion board update template

Good for writing the narrative, but you're still manually pasting in the numbers from Shopify, Stripe, and Plaid — Notion doesn't know what your burn rate is.

Visible.vc or Briefcase

Purpose-built for investor updates with some data connections, but you're locked into their report format and they won't pull your Shopify order detail, Meta ROAS, or 3PL spend into the same view.

Hiring a part-time CFO or finance contractor

Gets you a polished pack, but costs $2–5K/month and still depends on them chasing the same exports you're chasing now — the underlying data problem doesn't go away.

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

My revenue runs through Shopify, not Stripe. Can Starch still build the financial pack?

Yes. Connect Shopify from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live for GMV, net revenue, and order volume. Starch syncs your Plaid bank feed on a schedule for cash and burn. You don't need Stripe to be your primary revenue source for this to work.

My bookkeeper closes the books in QuickBooks 30 days after month-end. Will the board pack numbers match?

Starch's Runway Analysis uses your Plaid bank transactions and Stripe data — which are current daily — rather than waiting for QuickBooks to close. The numbers will be directionally accurate and more timely than a closed-books report. If your board specifically wants GAAP-closed figures, Starch also syncs QuickBooks entity-level data (invoices, bills, vendors, payments) on a schedule, though the P&L report view is temporarily disabled while an upstream connector fix is in progress.

Can Starch pull my Meta Ads and TikTok spend into the pack automatically?

Meta Ads connects from Starch's integration catalog and the agent queries it live. TikTok Ads doesn't have a formal catalog connector today, but Starch can automate your TikTok Ads Manager through your browser — no API needed — to pull spend and performance data when your pack runs.

I send my board update as a PDF or a deck, not an email. Can Starch produce that format?

The Investor Reporting app sends a formatted email-based report today. A Presentation Agent that builds slide decks from a text description is currently in development — you can request beta access to get notified when it launches. In the meantime, the email report is clean enough that most founders copy-paste the narrative into their existing deck template in under 10 minutes.

Is my financial data secure? You're connecting to my bank.

Starch uses Plaid's OAuth connection — you authenticate directly with your bank, and Starch receives read-only transaction data. Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today, which is worth knowing if your investors or board have specific compliance requirements. That's the honest answer.

What if I want to show gross margin by SKU, not just total gross margin?

Describe it to Starch. Something like: 'Show me gross margin by top 10 SKUs, pulling COGS from Plaid transactions tagged to my 3PL and manufacturing vendors, and revenue by SKU from Shopify.' The agent builds the view. This isn't a pre-built template feature — it's a custom surface you describe in natural language.