Finance & FP&A

How to build a monthly board financial pack as Small Finance Teams

Finance & FP&AFor Small Finance Teams2 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Your board pack is a three-day project every quarter. You pull actuals from NetSuite or QuickBooks into a Google Sheet, reconcile AR against Stripe payouts manually, rebuild the cash bridge from scratch, copy-paste variance tables into Google Slides, and then spend another afternoon formatting charts so they don't look like they were made in 2009. The CFO redlines the narrative the night before the board meeting. You update numbers that changed during close, re-export, re-paste. You do this while also answering the CEO's 'what's gross margin by product line?' question and chasing two AP approvals that are holding up close. The board pack itself takes 12-15 hours of your team's time on top of a month-end that was already full.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Finance & FP&AFor Small Finance Teams2 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live financial data layer that syncs your QuickBooks, NetSuite, Stripe, and Plaid data on a schedule — so your actuals are always current without a manual export

An Investor Reporting app that pulls those live metrics, writes the variance narrative, and formats the board pack consistently every quarter without you rebuilding it from scratch

A Runway Analysis dashboard that keeps your burn rate, net cash, and forward projection updated daily so the 'how many months of runway?' slide writes itself

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 QuickBooks data on a schedule (invoices, bills, payments, vendors, and journal entries), syncs your NetSuite data on a schedule (income statements, balance sheets, journal entries), syncs your Stripe data on a schedule (charges, customers, subscriptions, invoices), and syncs your Plaid bank feed data on a schedule (categorized transactions and balances). All four sources feed both the Investor Reporting app and the Runway Analysis dashboard. No manual exports, no CSV uploads.

Prompts to copy

Build me a quarterly board financial pack that pulls actuals from QuickBooks, shows revenue by product line from Stripe, includes a 13-week cash bridge comparing last quarter to this quarter, and writes a one-paragraph variance narrative for each section. Format it for a 45-minute board meeting.

Build me a burn rate dashboard using our Stripe revenue and Plaid bank feed that shows net burn month-by-month for the last 6 months, projects forward 18 months at current pace, and flags the month we cross below $500K cash on hand.

Add a revenue bridge section to the investor reporting app: show ARR at start of quarter, expansion, new business, churn, and ending ARR with a waterfall chart.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect QuickBooks or NetSuite — whichever is your system of record — so Starch syncs your actuals on a schedule. If you run both, connect both; Starch will pull from each.

2 Connect Stripe so Starch syncs charges, subscriptions, and invoices. This is what makes the revenue-by-product-line and MRR growth slides auto-populate.

3 Connect your primary operating account via Plaid. Starch syncs categorized transactions and balances on a schedule, which is the foundation of the cash bridge and burn rate calculations.

4 Open the Investor Reporting app from the Starch App Store and configure it for your board cadence — quarterly for the board pack, monthly if you also send monthly updates. Answer the setup questions about your fiscal quarter, product lines, and investor audience.

5 Open the Runway Analysis app and set your low-cash threshold. This is the number that defines the 'runway risk' slide every board deck needs — when do you dip below six months of cash?

6 Describe the board pack structure you want Starch to build. Type it in plain language: which sections, what KPIs, what comparisons (QoQ, YoY, budget vs. actual), and what narrative format the board expects.

7 Review the first draft Starch generates. The variance narrative will call out the largest delta lines from QuickBooks and explain them in plain English — flag anything where the context Starch inferred is wrong and correct it once. Starch remembers for next quarter.

8 Add any one-off slides that require context only you have — headcount changes, a large customer win, a new contract that hasn't hit the books yet. Type the context as a note; Starch incorporates it into the narrative.

9 Export the board pack. The Presentation Agent is currently in development (request beta access), but you can export the data and narrative to Google Slides today and use the structured output Starch generates as your copy-paste source — eliminating the 'rebuild from scratch' step.

10 For the next quarter, open the same app. The actuals have already synced. Update the narrative context for anything that changed, confirm the numbers look right, and export. What was 12-15 hours is now closer to 2-3.

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

Q1 2026 Board Pack — March close

Sample numbers from a real run

ARR (start of quarter)	3,200,000
New business ARR	410,000
Expansion ARR	95,000
Churned ARR	-180,000
ARR (end of quarter)	3,525,000
Net burn (Q1 average monthly)	-310,000
Cash on hand (March 31)	4,100,000
Implied runway at current burn	13.2

Your QuickBooks sync shows operating expenses of $1.12M for Q1, up $140K from Q4 — driven primarily by the two engineering hires that closed in January (salaries hit in February, benefits in March) and a $28K increase in cloud infrastructure that maps to the product launch in late February. Stripe syncs show $3.525M ARR at March 31, with $410K in new business closing ahead of plan but churn of $180K — two mid-market customers who didn't renew — coming in above forecast. Plaid shows $4.1M cash on hand against $310K average monthly net burn, giving the board 13.2 months of runway at current pace. Starch wrote the variance narrative in the Investor Reporting app by comparing the QuickBooks actuals against the prior quarter's synced data, flagging the infrastructure spend line and the churn figure as the two items most likely to prompt board questions. You added two sentences about the churn accounts — both were price-sensitive SMBs the team had already decided to let go — and the pack was done.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Net burn rate (monthly average, trailing 3 months) vs. budget

Runway in months at current burn pace

ARR waterfall: new business, expansion, churn, and net new ARR quarter-over-quarter

Gross margin by product line (Stripe revenue minus COGS from QuickBooks)

Budget vs. actual variance by department, flagging lines more than 10% off plan

Comparison

What this replaces

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

NetSuite + Google Sheets manual export

You own full control over every cell, but rebuilding the board pack from a CSV export every quarter is exactly the 12-15 hour process Starch replaces — and the version you export the night before close is already stale by board day.

Mosaic or Jirav (dedicated FP&A tools)

Purpose-built for financial modeling and board reporting, but they cost $1,500-$3,000/month, require a multi-week implementation, and don't let you build arbitrary custom surfaces the way Starch does — you get their template, not yours.

Notion or Confluence for narrative + Slides for charts

Works fine for drafting, but there's no live data connection — every number is a manual paste and you're back to the reconciliation problem the week of the board meeting.

Excel + PowerPoint (or Google equivalents) full stack

Zero incremental cost and full formatting control, but this is the status quo your team is trying to escape — it's not wrong, it's just expensive in hours and error-prone when numbers change between first draft and board day.

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 sync QuickBooks report views like the P&L and Transaction List?

Not right now. QuickBooks report views (P&L, Transaction List, Vendor Expenses) are temporarily disabled pending a fix on the connector. What does sync — on a schedule, reliably — is entity-level data: invoices, bills, payments, vendors, and journal entries. For most board pack use cases (revenue, opex, AP aging, cash bridge) this is sufficient, and the Investor Reporting and Runway Analysis apps are built around this data. We'll document when report views come back online.

We use NetSuite, not QuickBooks. Does that work?

Yes. Starch syncs NetSuite on a schedule — income statements, balance sheets, journal entries, and expense data. The Investor Reporting app works with NetSuite the same way it works with QuickBooks. If you run both (some teams do during a migration), you can connect both and Starch will pull from each.

What about Ramp or Bill.com for AP data? We chase approvals there, not in QuickBooks.

Ramp and Bill.com are reachable from Starch's integration catalog of 3,000+ apps; the agent queries them live when your app needs the data. They're not on the scheduled-sync list the way QuickBooks and Plaid are, so if you need historical AP aging trended over time, the better source today is QuickBooks or Plaid transactions. For a board pack that wants a current AP snapshot, a live query against Ramp or Bill.com works fine.

How does the narrative get written? Is it just generic AI text I have to rewrite anyway?

The Investor Reporting app pulls the actual numbers from your connected sources, identifies the largest variances, and drafts narrative around the data it found — not generic filler. You'll still review it and add context Starch doesn't have (why a customer churned, what a large expense was for). But the starting point is grounded in your actual numbers, and Starch carries your corrections forward so the next quarter's draft reflects your style.

Is Starch SOC 2 Type II certified? Our board will ask.

Not yet. Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your board or a board member's firm requires SOC 2 Type II for any tool that touches financial data, that's worth knowing upfront. We'd rather you have the accurate answer than find out mid-implementation.

The Presentation Agent sounds like exactly what we need for slides. Is it available?

Presentation Agent is currently in development. You can request beta access to get notified when it launches. In the meantime, the Investor Reporting app produces structured narrative and data that you can export and paste into Google Slides — it's not the same as auto-generated slides, but it eliminates the 'rebuild from scratch' problem. The slide formatting work is still yours; the data and narrative work is Starch's.

We update our board pack numbers the night before the meeting when the CFO has final comments. Will Starch data be current enough?

Stripe, Plaid, QuickBooks, and NetSuite all sync on a schedule — so yes, the data Starch is working from reflects your most recent close, not a snapshot from when you first set up the app. If your close finishes Tuesday and the board meets Thursday, Thursday's pack pulls from Tuesday's actuals. For any number that changed after your scheduled sync, you can manually note the update in Starch and it incorporates it into the narrative.