Finance & FP&A

How to build a monthly board financial pack as Small Investor Relations Teams

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

Your board pack takes four days you don't have. You're pulling Q1 actuals from QuickBooks, cash movements from Plaid, ARR from Stripe, and headcount costs from Paylocity — four logins, four exports, four manual pastes into a Google Slides deck that your CFO will mark up at 11pm before the meeting. The institutional IR platforms your larger peers use cost $50k+/year and assume a dedicated IR-ops analyst sitting next to you. You're a team of two. Every month you're building the same slides from scratch, reconciling numbers that don't agree, and hoping the board doesn't ask a follow-up that requires a fifth system you haven't touched yet.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

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

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live board financial pack that pulls actuals from QuickBooks, Stripe, and Plaid on a schedule — so the numbers in your slides are never from last Tuesday's export

An investor-reporting workflow that drafts the burn, runway, MRR growth, and narrative sections automatically, consistent with the tone your board already knows

A custom KPI dashboard your CEO and GP can check between meetings, built on the same connected data sources, without you fielding 'can you send me the latest numbers' Slacks

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, vendors, payments, journal entries), your Stripe data on a schedule (charges, subscriptions, payouts), and your Plaid data on a schedule (categorized transactions, balances). Paylocity headcount and payroll data also syncs on a schedule. For LP portals like Intralinks or Juniper Square that don't have a direct integration, Starch automates them through your browser — no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Pull our QuickBooks actuals, Stripe MRR, and Plaid cash balance for Q1 2026. Build a monthly board financial pack with burn rate, runway, MRR growth vs. prior quarter, top three expense categories, and a one-paragraph narrative summary. Format it for a 10-person board audience and use the same tone as our February 2026 update.

Show me a live runway dashboard using our Plaid bank feeds and Stripe revenue. Calculate net burn using a 6-month trailing average, project forward 24 months, and flag the month where cash drops below $2M. Refresh daily.

Build a KPI summary view for our GP that shows ARR, net burn, months of runway, and headcount cost as a percentage of revenue. Pull from the same QuickBooks, Stripe, and Plaid connections we already have set up.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect QuickBooks, Stripe, Plaid, and Paylocity from Starch's scheduled-sync providers. These sync automatically on a schedule, so you're never pulling a manual export again.

2 Open the Investor Reporting app from the Starch App Store — it's pre-built for exactly this workflow. It already knows how to pull burn from Plaid, MRR from Stripe, and expenses from QuickBooks.

3 Tell Starch what period you're covering, what your board cares about this quarter (e.g., path to profitability, pipeline coverage, headcount efficiency), and paste in your last board update so it can match your tone.

4 Starch drafts the financial narrative: burn rate, runway, MRR growth, top expense categories, and a risks-and-wins section. Review it — this takes 20 minutes, not two days.

5 Open the Runway Analysis app to generate the cash projection chart. Set your low-cash threshold ($2M, or whatever covenant applies) and Starch flags the breach month in the projection.

6 Add a custom KPI section by describing it in natural language: 'Show headcount cost as a percentage of revenue, CAC payback period from our Stripe and HubSpot data, and NRR trend over the last four quarters.' Starch builds the view.

7 For LP data room updates in Intralinks or Juniper Square, use Starch's browser automation to upload the finished pack and update the document index — no API required on their end.

8 Set the board pack to auto-draft 72 hours before your board meeting using the same data connections, so you're reviewing a draft instead of starting from zero.

9 Share the live KPI dashboard link with your CEO and GP. When they have a follow-up question — 'what's driving the burn increase?' — Starch can answer it from the same connected data without you fielding the Slack.

10 After each board meeting, use the Investor Reporting app to send a post-meeting update to your LP list with any commitments made, updated runway, and next milestone. Same connections, different surface, five minutes.

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 28 close

Sample numbers from a real run

Stripe MRR (March 2026)	412,000
Stripe MRR (December 2025)	371,000
Net burn (6-month trailing avg, Plaid)	-187,000
Cash balance (Plaid, March 28)	4,820,000
Payroll & benefits (Paylocity, Q1)	1,090,000
Months of runway at current burn	25
QuickBooks AR outstanding (March 31)	318,000

For the March 2026 board pack, Starch pulled QuickBooks actuals through March 28, Stripe charges and subscriptions through end of month, and Plaid balances as of that morning. MRR came in at $412K, up 11% from $371K in December — Starch flagged the growth rate in the narrative and noted it was driven by two enterprise expansions closed in February (pulled from the Stripe subscription data). Net burn on a 6-month trailing average from Plaid was $187K/month, giving 25.8 months of runway against $4.82M cash. Paylocity showed Q1 payroll at $1.09M, which Starch automatically expressed as headcount cost at 88% of quarterly revenue — a ratio the board had flagged as a watch item in Q4. The AR aging from QuickBooks showed $318K outstanding with two invoices past 60 days, which Starch surfaced as a cash-flow risk in the narrative section. Total time from 'open Starch' to 'board pack ready for CFO review': 45 minutes, down from a prior-quarter baseline of three and a half days.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Net burn rate (6-month trailing average from Plaid transactions)

Months of runway (cash balance / net burn, refreshed daily)

MRR and QoQ MRR growth rate (Stripe subscriptions)

Headcount cost as a percentage of revenue (Paylocity + Stripe)

AR aging — invoices past 30/60/90 days (QuickBooks)

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Juniper Square / Addepar / iLevel

Purpose-built for LP reporting at scale, but starts at $50k+/year, assumes a dedicated IR-ops analyst, and doesn't connect to your operating data (Stripe, Plaid, Paylocity) — so you're still reconciling two separate systems manually.

Google Slides + manual exports

No software cost, but every board pack is three to four days of manual work pulling from four different logins, and the numbers are stale by the time you present them.

Visible.vc

Good for founder-to-investor update emails at seed stage, but limited financial modeling depth and doesn't connect to QuickBooks or NetSuite for companies that have moved to accrual accounting.

Notion or Coda with manual data paste

Flexible and cheap, but there's no live data connection — someone still has to update the numbers by hand before every board meeting, which is the exact problem you're trying to solve.

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 connect to QuickBooks, or does it just read exports?

Starch syncs directly to QuickBooks on a schedule — invoices, bills, vendors, payments, journal entries, and more. No CSV exports, no manual uploads. One caveat: QuickBooks report views (the pre-built P&L, Transaction List, and Vendor Expenses reports) are temporarily unavailable pending an upstream fix. Entity-level data, which is what your board pack needs, syncs normally.

Our LP portal is Intralinks and they don't have a public API. Can Starch still upload the finished pack there?

Yes. Starch automates Intralinks through your browser — no API needed. You'd describe the upload workflow once (log in, navigate to the document folder, upload the PDF, update the index) and Starch handles it each cycle.

We use NetSuite, not QuickBooks. Does this still work?

Yes. Starch syncs NetSuite data on a schedule — invoices, expenses, journal entries, balance sheets, income statements. The Investor Reporting app uses NetSuite as one of its primary connections for exactly this reason.

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

Not yet. Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. If your board or LP base requires it as a condition of connecting financial systems, that's worth knowing upfront. It's on the roadmap.

Can the board access the live KPI dashboard directly, or do we have to send a static export?

You can share a live dashboard link that pulls from the same connected data sources. Your CEO or GP sees the numbers as of the last scheduled sync — not a snapshot from last week's export. You stay in control of what's visible and can revoke access at any time.

What happens if my Stripe MRR and QuickBooks revenue don't reconcile?

Starch will show you both numbers. It won't silently pick one. For a board pack, you'll want to review the reconciliation before the draft goes out — which is still far faster than assembling both numbers manually. Flagging discrepancies is something you can build into the app: 'Alert me if Stripe MRR and QuickBooks deferred revenue differ by more than 5%.'

The Presentation Agent app sounds useful for the actual slide deck. Is that available now?

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 a formatted report with charts and narrative that most IR teams export to PDF or paste into their existing slide template.