Investor Relations

How to build a board meeting deck as Asset Management Founders

Investor RelationsFor Asset Management Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Every quarter you build a board deck by hand. You pull cash figures from Plaid or your bank portal, revenue from Stripe, LP contribution history from a spreadsheet, and portfolio company updates from whatever format each founder emailed you. Then you paste everything into a Google Slides template you half-designed two years ago, realize the numbers are already stale, update them again, and send a PDF at 11pm the night before. There's no analyst to delegate this to. The $50k/year tools like Juniper Square assume you have an ops team to configure them. You spend a full day on a deck that should take two hours.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Investor RelationsFor Asset Management Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live-data board deck that pulls fund cash position, runway, and LP capital deployment directly from your connected financial accounts — no manual copy-paste before each meeting

An Investor Reporting workflow that drafts the quarterly narrative, portfolio highlights, and risk flags automatically, so your prep time drops from a full day to a review pass

A Runway Analysis dashboard your board members can reference between meetings, showing net burn, 24-month cash projection, and expense breakdown updated daily

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 Presentation Agent

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Plaid bank feed and Stripe data on a schedule — fund operating account transactions, balances, and management fee receipts are refreshed automatically and live in Starch before you open the deck. QuickBooks entity-level data (invoices, bills, vendor payments, journal entries) is also synced on a schedule if your fund uses it for back-office bookkeeping. Google Calendar connects on a scheduled sync so Starch knows your board meeting date and can trigger draft generation in advance. Any LP data or portfolio company updates you track in Notion sync automatically as well. For materials that live on a web portal without a direct API — say, a fund administrator's reporting portal or a custodian dashboard — Starch automates access through your browser with no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Build me a quarterly board meeting deck for Q1 2026. Include: fund cash position and runway, LP capital deployed vs committed by vintage, portfolio company updates from the notes I'll paste in, top three risks, and a 12-month forward projection. Use our fund's brand colors (navy and sand) and keep slides clean — one idea per slide.

Show me net burn and runway for the fund over the last 6 months, broken down by management fees received, operating expenses, and portfolio support costs. Flag any expense category that's up more than 15% quarter-over-quarter.

Draft the Q1 2026 investor update for our LP base. Pull our current cash and burn from Plaid, revenue/management fee receipts from Stripe, and add a section on portfolio company milestones that I'll provide. Keep the tone consistent with the Q4 2025 update I'll attach.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect your fund's operating account through Plaid — Starch syncs transactions, balances, and expense categories on a schedule, so your cash position is always current without a manual export.

2 Connect Stripe so management fee receipts, subscription billing for any SaaS the fund operates, and payout history sync automatically into Starch's Runway Analysis app.

3 If you use QuickBooks for fund bookkeeping, connect it — Starch syncs invoices, bills, vendor payments, and journal entries, giving you the underlying data for an accurate P&L breakdown by quarter.

4 Open the Runway Analysis app and confirm the expense category mapping looks right for a fund context (management fees in, operating expenses and portfolio support costs out). Set your 24-month projection assumptions — headcount, planned LP calls, fund admin fees.

5 Open the Investor Reporting app and connect your LP list — paste in email addresses or connect your CRM. Tell Starch the tone and format you've used in past updates so it stays consistent.

6 A week before the board meeting, type your prompt into Starch describing the deck you need. Include the meeting date, the sections you want, and paste in any portfolio company updates you've collected from founders.

7 Starch drafts the deck using your live Plaid and Stripe data for all financial slides, and uses the portfolio updates you provided for the narrative sections. The Presentation Agent — currently in development; request beta access — will handle layout and slide formatting automatically.

8 Review the draft. If a number looks off, ask Starch to show you the underlying transaction detail — it can pull the Plaid or Stripe records that fed the figure.

9 Iterate on individual slides in plain language: 'Move the risk section before the portfolio update slide' or 'Add a bar chart comparing Q1 2026 burn to Q1 2025 burn.'

10 Export the deck to PDF or a shareable link and distribute to board members. The Runway Analysis dashboard URL can go in the appendix so board members can check live figures between meetings.

11 After the board meeting, use the Investor Reporting app to send the formal LP quarterly update — it will reuse the same financial data already pulled for the deck, so you're not re-entering numbers.

12 Set a recurring automation: 'Two weeks before each quarter-end, pull the latest Plaid and Stripe data, draft a board deck outline, and Slack me a summary of what's changed since last quarter.' Starch runs it on schedule.

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

Q1 2026 Board Meeting — March 28, 2026

Sample numbers from a real run

Fund operating cash (Plaid)	1,840,000
Management fees received YTD (Stripe)	312,000
Operating expenses YTD (Plaid categorized)	198,000
Portfolio support costs YTD	47,000
Net burn (monthly average, Q1)	-28,000
Projected runway at current burn	65

For the March 28 board meeting, Starch pulled the fund's Plaid-connected operating account and found $1.84M in cash. Management fee receipts of $312K YTD came in from Stripe — the fund bills three portfolio companies on a quarterly schedule. Operating expenses of $198K (fund admin, legal, office, travel) and $47K in portfolio support costs (a bridge loan reimbursement and two co-investor legal reviews) put Q1 net burn at roughly $28K/month. At that pace, runway is 65 months — well within LP expectations, but Starch flagged that legal expenses were up 34% quarter-over-quarter and surfaced the two transactions behind the spike so the board could discuss whether to expect that again in Q2. The deck's portfolio section pulled in milestone updates the fund manager had pasted in from founder emails: two portfolio companies hit ARR targets, one pushed a product launch to Q2. Total board prep time: one evening review pass instead of a full day.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Net fund burn per month (operating expenses minus management fee receipts)

LP capital deployed vs. committed by vintage year

Runway in months at current burn rate

Management fee collection rate and lag (days from invoice to receipt)

Quarterly variance in operating expense categories (legal, admin, travel, portfolio support)

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Juniper Square

Built for established funds with dedicated ops staff — pricing starts well above what an emerging manager's management fee can support, and setup requires a full implementation process that assumes you have someone to own it.

Google Slides + manual Plaid/Stripe exports

Free and familiar, but you're spending 6-8 hours per quarter on data gathering, formatting, and version control instead of that time being handled automatically.

Addepar or iLevel

Excellent portfolio analytics for funds with dozens of positions and a data team, but overkill and cost-prohibitive for a sub-$100M emerging manager who needs operational reporting more than portfolio attribution.

Visible.vc

Good for LP update emails and simple dashboards, but limited composability — you can't build a custom expense breakdown or trigger a board deck draft from the same platform you use for scheduling and CRM.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — investor reporting, runway analysis, presentation agent 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 store my fund's financial data, or does it query it fresh each time?

Plaid and Stripe data syncs on a schedule and lives in Starch's database, so your dashboard and deck drafts pull from data that's already there — no waiting for a live API call when you open the app. QuickBooks entity-level data works the same way. This is not a long-horizon data warehouse; it's a live operational surface updated on a rolling basis, not archived analytics going back 10 years.

Is Starch SOC 2 Type II certified? My LPs may ask.

Not yet. Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. That's worth knowing before you connect sensitive fund financials. It's on the roadmap. If LP data security requirements are strict, you'll want to evaluate that gap directly.

Can Starch pull data from my fund administrator's portal if they don't have an API?

Yes. If your fund admin's reporting portal is web-accessible and you can log in and navigate it, Starch can automate that through your browser — no API needed. This is the same mechanism Starch uses for platforms that don't publish formal integrations.

The Presentation Agent sounds like what I actually need — is it live?

The Presentation Agent is currently in development. You can request beta access to get notified when it launches. In the meantime, Starch's Investor Reporting app produces structured narrative output you can drop into a deck, and you can describe the slide structure you want Starch to generate as a formatted document.

My QuickBooks has a P&L report I use for board meetings — can Starch pull that?

QuickBooks report views like P&L are temporarily disabled pending a connector fix. Entity-level data — bills, invoices, vendor payments, journal entries — syncs normally. Starch can reconstruct a P&L-style view from those underlying entities, but the pre-built QuickBooks report sync is not currently available.

Can I set this up to run automatically before every board meeting without me triggering it manually?

Yes. You can describe a scheduled automation to Starch: 'Two weeks before each quarter-end, pull the latest Plaid and Stripe data, draft a board deck outline based on the template we used last quarter, and Slack me a summary of what's changed.' Starch runs it on that schedule. You still review and edit the draft — the automation handles the data gathering and first-pass structure.

I track LP relationships and capital calls in a spreadsheet. Can Starch replace that?

You can describe a custom LP tracking app to Starch in plain language — something like 'build me a CRM that tracks LP name, committed capital, called capital, distribution history, last contact date, and next follow-up.' Starch builds it. There's no pre-built LP CRM template in the App Store yet, but the custom app authoring handles this kind of structured relationship tracking directly.