Investor Relations

How to build a board meeting deck as Chief of Staff and Founder's Office

Investor RelationsFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Every quarter you spend the week before the board meeting acting as a human data pipeline. You pull burn and runway from your bookkeeper's latest QuickBooks export, chase the VP of Sales for a HubSpot pipeline screenshot, copy-paste MRR from Stripe, format the org chart manually, and reconcile four versions of the OKR slide that each functional lead sent you at 11pm the night before. By the time you've stitched it together in Google Slides, you've spent three to four days on a deck that will be discussed for ninety minutes. The numbers are already stale. Something always slips through — last quarter it was the gross margin figure that used pre-adjustment bookkeeping. This is the one deliverable the CEO cannot be late on, and it falls entirely on you.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Investor RelationsFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live board-prep workspace that pulls burn, runway, MRR, pipeline, and headcount from your actual systems — HubSpot, QuickBooks, Stripe, Plaid, and Paylocity — so the numbers in the deck are always the numbers in the business

An AI-assisted deck-drafting workflow where you describe the narrative, Starch pulls the metrics, and you review a structured slide outline instead of starting from a blank Google Slides file

A repeatable process you can run the same way next quarter — same data sources, same structure, same handoff to the CEO — without rebuilding it from scratch each cycle

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, QuickBooks, and Paylocity data on a schedule so financial figures update automatically. HubSpot and Calendly connect from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries them live when the board prep workspace refreshes. Notion and Slack also connect from the integration catalog so the agent can pull in any functional-lead updates or OKR notes your team has logged. Google Calendar syncs on a schedule and surfaces exec availability and board meeting logistics automatically.

Prompts to copy

Build me a board meeting prep workspace for our Q2 2026 board meeting. Pull our current burn rate and 18-month runway projection from Plaid and Stripe. Pull our ARR, MRR, and net revenue retention from Stripe. Pull our open pipeline, weighted pipeline, and deals closed this quarter from HubSpot. Pull total headcount and payroll run rate from Paylocity. Organize this into a board-ready summary with sections for financial health, revenue performance, sales pipeline, and team. Flag anything that moved more than 15% from last quarter.

Using the Runway Analysis app, show me our real net burn for the last 6 months broken down by expense category, our current cash balance, and our projected runway at current burn, at 10% lower burn, and at 10% higher burn. I need this to match what our CFO will present, so pull directly from Plaid bank feeds.

Draft the narrative sections for our Q2 board deck: a 3-paragraph business update, a 2-paragraph risk and mitigation section based on our pipeline coverage ratio and runway, and a 1-paragraph forward outlook. Use the tone of our last investor update. Keep it direct — our board does not want fluffy language.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect your financial sources: Starch syncs Stripe (MRR, invoices, subscriptions), Plaid (bank transactions, balances, burn), and QuickBooks (bills, payroll, journal entries) on a schedule. These become the authoritative numbers for the deck — no more reconciling between your bookkeeper's export and what Stripe actually shows.

2 Connect your people data: Starch syncs Paylocity on a schedule so headcount, payroll run rate, and any Q2 hires or departures are current without you chasing HR for a headcount file.

3 Connect your pipeline data: connect HubSpot from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries your deals, stages, and pipeline value live each time your board prep workspace runs. No manual pipeline screenshot from the VP of Sales.

4 Connect your operational context: connect Notion from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can pull in OKR pages, functional-lead updates, and any board pre-reads your team has already drafted. Connect Slack from the catalog to pull key decisions or status updates from relevant channels.

5 Open the Runway Analysis app and validate that the burn and runway numbers match your CFO's view. Run the three-scenario projection (current burn, -10%, +10%) and flag the output for review — this slide is always the one that generates the most board discussion.

6 Open the Investor Reporting app and use its connected financial data as the foundation for the board deck financials section. Instead of drafting from scratch, you're reviewing and editing a structured output that already has your Plaid and Stripe numbers in it.

7 Type your board narrative prompt into Starch: describe what happened this quarter — key wins, key risks, what changed on the pipeline, any team milestones — and Starch drafts the written sections of the deck using the live data already in its workspace.

8 Review the AI-drafted output section by section. The financial slides should already match your connected data. The narrative sections will need your editorial judgment — the CEO's voice, the specific framing for this board's sensitivities. This is where your time actually belongs.

9 Export the structured content and take it into Google Slides or whatever format your board deck uses. The Presentation Agent (currently in beta — request access to get notified at launch) will eventually handle this export step natively.

10 Run a final sanity check: verify the burn number matches the CFO's close, verify the pipeline number matches what Sales confirmed, and verify headcount matches HR. With live-sync data this check takes minutes, not a half-day.

11 Save this entire workspace configuration. Next quarter you reopen it, refresh the data connections, update the narrative prompt with Q3 context, and run the same process. The structure is already built.

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

Q2 2026 Board Deck — June 2026 close

Sample numbers from a real run

Net burn (May 2026, from Plaid)	387,000
Cash balance (June 1, from Plaid)	4,820,000
Projected runway at current burn	12
MRR (June 1, from Stripe)	218,000
Weighted pipeline (from HubSpot)	1,140,000
Total headcount (from Paylocity)	152

It's the Monday before the June board meeting. Historically this is the day you cancel everything else. This quarter, you open your Starch board prep workspace at 9am. Plaid has already synced Friday's bank balance: $4.82M cash. Stripe shows $218K MRR, up from $196K in March — you didn't have to pull that number; it's already there. QuickBooks shows May net burn at $387K, which is $18K lower than April because the Seattle office lease ended. Paylocity shows 152 employees, reflecting the two engineering hires that closed in May. You type your board narrative prompt, describe the quarter — strong pipeline build in enterprise, one churn in SMB, two exec hires closed, AWS costs down 12% — and Starch drafts the business update and risk sections. You spend ninety minutes editing tone and adding the CEO's specific framing on the Series B timeline. By noon you have a complete structured deck outline with live numbers, a narrative that passes the 'would the CEO say this' test, and four hours left to handle the one thing that always surprises you the week of the board meeting. The $387K burn figure you handed the CFO matched what he independently calculated from QuickBooks — no reconciliation call needed.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Net burn vs. prior quarter (and whether it matches what the CFO independently calculated)

Months of runway at current burn, burn -10%, burn +10%

Pipeline coverage ratio: weighted pipeline vs. quarterly revenue target

MRR growth rate quarter-over-quarter and net revenue retention

Days spent on board prep vs. prior quarter (the meta-KPI only you track)

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Slides + manual data pulls

You keep full design control but spend 3-4 days every quarter doing data-retrieval work that should take 30 minutes — and the numbers are stale the moment you paste them.

Notion board prep template + manual updates

Good for tracking tasks and collecting functional-lead inputs, but Notion can't query HubSpot, Plaid, or Stripe directly, so you're still reconciling numbers by hand.

Pitch or Beautiful.ai

These make slides look better faster, but they have no connection to your financial systems, so you're still the one manually entering every number.

Hiring a FP&A analyst

Solves the numbers problem but adds a headcount, a manager, and a communication layer — and you still own the narrative and the cross-functional coordination.

PowerPoint + BI tool export

Works if your BI tool already has all your sources connected and maintained, which at 150 people it probably doesn't — someone has to keep those pipelines running.

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

Will the numbers Starch pulls match what my CFO pulls from the same sources?

For Stripe and Plaid they should match exactly — Starch syncs directly from those APIs on a schedule and shows you the raw figures. For QuickBooks, Starch syncs entity-level data (invoices, bills, payments, journal entries, vendors) on a schedule. One honest note: QuickBooks report views like the full P&L and Transaction List are temporarily unavailable while an upstream connector fix is in progress, so for a formatted P&L you'll still want to pull that view directly from QuickBooks. Entity-level data — which is what most board deck numbers are built on — syncs normally.

Can Starch pull the OKR updates our functional leads put in Notion?

Yes. Connect Notion from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries your pages and databases live. If your team logs OKR progress in a Notion database, Starch can read those records and include them in your board prep summary. You'd tell Starch something like: 'Pull the current status of all Q2 OKRs from our Notion OKR database and flag any that are below 70% progress.'

What about slides? Does Starch actually build the deck?

Starch builds the content, data, and structure. The Presentation Agent — which creates fully formatted slide decks from a text description — is currently in development; request beta access on the Starch site to get notified when it launches. Today, Starch gives you a complete structured outline with live numbers and AI-drafted narrative that you take into Google Slides or PowerPoint. The deck-building step is still yours; the data-retrieval and first-draft-writing steps are not.

Our board deck needs data from a tool that isn't HubSpot, QuickBooks, or Stripe — we use Salesforce for CRM and Xero for accounting. Does that work?

Yes. Salesforce and Xero both connect from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries them live when your board prep workspace runs. You'd connect them the same way you'd connect HubSpot or QuickBooks — through the Starch integration browser — and then reference them in your prompt: 'Pull our pipeline from Salesforce and our latest P&L from Xero.'

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? Our board will ask about data security.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. That's worth knowing before you connect your Plaid bank feeds and Stripe revenue data. If your board or legal team requires SOC 2 Type II for any tool touching financial data, that's a real constraint to weigh. Starch is direct about this rather than burying it.

How long does it actually take to set this up the first time?

Connecting Stripe, Plaid, QuickBooks, HubSpot, and Paylocity takes 20-40 minutes the first time — you're authenticating each source through Starch's connection browser. Building the board prep workspace with your first prompt takes another 30-60 minutes of iteration. The second quarter you open the same workspace, refresh the data, update the narrative prompt, and run it. That's the payoff.

Can my CEO or CFO access the same workspace, or is this just a tool for me?

The workspace you build in Starch is shareable with your team. Your CFO can open the Runway Analysis view directly. Your CEO can review the narrative draft before you finalize it. You're not the only person who has to log in — though in practice, you're probably still the one who builds and maintains it.