Finance & FP&A

How to build a monthly board financial pack as Professional Services Founders

Finance & FP&AFor Professional Services Founders2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Every quarter-end, you pull Stripe invoices into a spreadsheet, export QuickBooks transaction detail, paste in a Plaid bank balance screenshot, and then spend two hours reconciling why the numbers don't match before your board call on Thursday. Your CFO-for-hire sends a draft on Tuesday; you redline it Wednesday night after client calls. The slide deck lives in Google Drive under 'Board Materials Q3 2025 FINAL v2 USE THIS ONE.' Revenue by client, utilization rate, pipeline coverage, cash runway — each one lives in a different tool. You already know what the pack needs to say. The problem is assembling it from four systems when you're also delivering client work that week.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Finance & FP&AFor Professional Services Founders2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live board financial pack that pulls Stripe revenue, Plaid bank transactions, and QuickBooks entity data — burn rate, net revenue, and cash runway calculated automatically — so the numbers are already done before you open a slide.

A HubSpot pipeline summary (deals by stage, weighted coverage, renewal risk) merged into the same pack, so your board sees revenue and sales in one place without you stitching spreadsheets.

A recurring monthly workflow that drafts the narrative update — wins, risks, burn trend — and formats it into a shareable report, cutting board-prep from half a day to under an hour.

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

Investor Reporting Runway Analysis

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Stripe, Plaid, and QuickBooks data on a schedule — charges, payouts, bank transactions, invoices, bills, and vendor payments refresh automatically and live in Starch's database. HubSpot deals and pipeline data are connected from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries them live when the pack runs. Google Calendar is also synced on a schedule so utilization context (client-facing hours) can be pulled into the narrative. No manual exports, no CSV uploads.

Prompts to copy

Build me a monthly board financial pack for a 12-person professional services firm. Pull net revenue and collections from Stripe, cash balance and operating expenses from Plaid, and invoice and bill detail from QuickBooks. Show burn rate, cash runway in months, revenue by client (top 5), and pipeline coverage from HubSpot deals. Format it as a board-ready report with a one-page executive summary and supporting detail. Email a draft to me and my fractional CFO on the 3rd of each month.

Create a runway analysis dashboard using Stripe revenue and Plaid bank feeds. Show 6-month trailing burn, 24-month forward projection at current run rate, and a scenario toggle for 20% revenue growth vs 20% revenue decline. I want to be able to show this live on screen during board calls without exporting anything.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Stripe and Plaid in Starch — both sync on a schedule, so your revenue, payout, and bank transaction history is live in Starch's database within minutes of setup.

2 Connect QuickBooks — Starch syncs 20+ entities including invoices, bills, payments, vendors, and journal entries, giving the board pack the same underlying data your bookkeeper works from.

3 Connect HubSpot from Starch's integration catalog — deals, companies, and owners are queried live each time the pack runs, so pipeline numbers reflect what's actually in your CRM that day.

4 Open the Investor Reporting starter app from the App Store — it's pre-wired for Stripe and Plaid and gives you a working monthly update template you can fork for a board audience instead of an investor one.

5 Tell Starch how to customize it: add QuickBooks bill detail, swap investor-narrative framing for board framing, and include a HubSpot pipeline section with deal-stage breakdown and weighted revenue coverage.

6 Open the Runway Analysis app and connect it to the same Stripe and Plaid sources — you now have a live cash runway dashboard you can pull up during the board call without touching a spreadsheet.

7 Set the board pack automation to run on the 2nd of each month — Starch pulls the prior month's data, calculates burn and runway, drafts the narrative summary, and emails a draft to you and your fractional CFO for review.

8 Review the draft on the 3rd — your job is editing tone, adding the one or two things that happened in the business that no data source captures (a key hire, a lost deal you're managing), and approving send.

9 Describe a client revenue breakdown view: 'Show me monthly revenue by client for the last 6 months, pulled from Stripe, sorted by total billed' — Starch builds this as a supporting data view inside the pack.

10 Add a retainer renewal risk section — tell Starch: 'Flag any HubSpot deals in the Renewal stage with close dates in the next 60 days and show associated Stripe revenue so I can see what's at risk this quarter.'

11 Share the finished pack as a link or export — board members get a consistent format every month, with charts and narrative, rather than a PDF you assembled at 11pm the night before the call.

12 After your first board call, fork the template to add or remove sections — utilization rate, headcount cost from Paylocity, or AWS cost from the AWS Cost Checker app — without rebuilding anything from scratch.

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 — 12-person strategy consultancy

Sample numbers from a real run

Gross Revenue (Stripe collections, March)	284,000
Operating Expenses (Plaid, March)	201,000
Net Burn	-83,000
Cash on Hand (Plaid balance)	1,140,000
Runway at current burn	13.7
Open Pipeline — HubSpot weighted	390,000
Retainer Renewals at Risk (next 60 days)	95,000

For the March 2026 board call, Starch pulled Stripe collections of $284K against $201K in operating expenses from Plaid bank feeds, producing a net burn figure of $83K — lower than the trailing 6-month average of $91K because two large retainer invoices cleared on March 28th instead of rolling into April. Cash on hand sits at $1.14M, giving 13.7 months of runway at current burn without new revenue. The HubSpot pipeline section showed $390K in weighted open deals, with $95K in retainer renewals due in the next 60 days — two clients flagged for the board's attention because they haven't had a quarterly business review scheduled yet (Starch cross-referenced HubSpot renewal stage against Google Calendar for client-facing meetings in Q1). The narrative draft took the founder 20 minutes to edit, mostly adding context about why one client's retainer scope expanded mid-month. The pack was in board members' inboxes by 8am on April 3rd.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Cash runway in months (net burn vs. Plaid balance, updated daily)

Revenue by client — top 5 clients as % of total Stripe collections

Weighted pipeline coverage — HubSpot deals as a multiple of monthly revenue target

Retainer renewal risk — ARR value of contracts expiring in the next 60 and 90 days

Utilization-implied capacity — billable hours from Calendar vs. total available, as a proxy for bench risk

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Manual spreadsheet (Google Sheets + CSV exports from Stripe, QuickBooks, HubSpot)

Takes 3-5 hours per month to assemble, breaks every time a column shifts, and has no narrative layer — you're doing all the writing after all the wrangling.

Kantata / Projector / Deltek (enterprise PSA)

Built for 200-person firms with a dedicated ops team; implementation takes a quarter and pricing starts well above what a 12-person consultancy should spend on reporting infrastructure.

Fathom or Spotlight Reporting (QuickBooks-native reporting tools)

Good for clean accounting-only reports, but can't pull your HubSpot pipeline, Stripe invoices, or Plaid bank data into the same view — you still stitch three tabs together before the board call.

Notion + manual updates

Flexible for narrative, but numbers are pasted in manually — you're still running the numbers yourself, just putting them in a nicer document.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — investor reporting, runway analysis 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 actually pull from QuickBooks, or just Stripe and Plaid?

Starch syncs QuickBooks directly — invoices, bills, vendor payments, journal entries, and more. One thing worth knowing: the QuickBooks report views like P&L and Transaction List are temporarily disabled while an upstream fix is in progress. But the entity-level data — the actual bills, invoices, and payments — syncs normally, and that's what powers the board pack numbers.

My board wants to see utilization rate, not just financials. Can Starch handle that?

Yes. Starch syncs your Google Calendar on a schedule — events, calendars, 12 months back and 3 months forward. You can describe a utilization view ('count hours in client-facing calendar events per person per week and show as a percentage of 40 hours') and Starch builds it as a section in the pack or a standalone dashboard. It's a proxy for logged time, not a Harvest replacement, but for board-level visibility it works.

What if my pipeline is in a Google Sheet instead of HubSpot?

Connect Google Sheets from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live when the pack runs. Tell Starch the column structure ('column B is deal name, column D is stage, column F is expected close value') and it pulls the right data into the pipeline section. Not as structured as a CRM sync, but it works.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? My board will ask.

Not yet — SOC 2 Type II certification is not currently in place. If your board or a client has a hard compliance requirement around that, it's worth knowing upfront. For most 12-person consultancies whose boards are also their investors, it hasn't been a blocker, but be straightforward about it.

How long does setup actually take? I've been burned by 'quick setup' tools before.

Connecting Stripe, Plaid, and QuickBooks takes about 15-20 minutes — OAuth flows, no CSV uploads. The Investor Reporting starter app runs as soon as the syncs complete. Customizing it for a board audience (adding HubSpot pipeline, adjusting the narrative framing, setting the email schedule) is another 30-45 minutes of describing what you want to Starch. You can have a working draft pack on the same day you sign up.

Can I use this for client reporting too, not just my own board?

Yes. Describe a client-facing version — 'build a monthly status report for each active client, showing hours logged from Calendar, invoices sent from Stripe, and open items from Notion, formatted as a PDF I can send' — and Starch builds it as a separate app or automation. The connections you set up for your board pack are reused; you're just describing a different output format and audience.