Investor Relations

How to build a board meeting deck as Professional Services Founders

Investor RelationsFor Professional Services Founders2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Every quarter you spend two to three days assembling a board deck from scratch: pulling utilization numbers from Float, revenue from Stripe, pipeline from HubSpot, and burn from your bookkeeper's latest QuickBooks close — which is always two weeks behind. You paste charts into Google Slides, format them to match last quarter's template, write the narrative at midnight before the meeting, and still walk in knowing the revenue number is slightly stale. There's no associate to delegate this to, and a proper board deck is too important to hand to an offshore VA. The deck takes longer than the board meeting itself.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Investor RelationsFor Professional Services Founders2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live board meeting deck that pulls revenue, burn, pipeline, and utilization data from your actual systems — so the numbers are current the morning of the meeting, not two weeks stale

An AI-drafted narrative layer that writes the wins, risks, and asks sections in your voice, based on the actual period results — you edit, not author from scratch

A repeatable quarterly process that compresses deck prep from two days to a two-hour review-and-refine 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 data (invoices, charges, payouts) and your Plaid bank feed (categorized transactions and balances) on a schedule — these power the financial slides and runway calculations. HubSpot is connected from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries your deals and pipeline stage data live when the deck runs. QuickBooks is connected as a scheduled-sync provider for any accrual-basis figures your board expects.

Prompts to copy

Build me a quarterly board update deck for a 12-person professional services firm. Pull revenue and burn from Stripe and Plaid. Include a trailing 6-month revenue chart, net burn trend, and a 12-month cash runway projection. Add a pipeline section I can populate manually with HubSpot deal stage data. Format it so each section has a headline metric, a one-paragraph narrative, and a 'what we need from the board' callout box.

Show me our current runway, net burn for Q1, and how this quarter's revenue compares to Q4 last year — pulling from Stripe and Plaid — so I can sanity-check the financials before I present.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Stripe and Plaid in Starch — both are scheduled-sync providers, so your revenue and bank transaction data refresh automatically on a regular cadence. This takes about five minutes per connection.

2 Connect HubSpot from Starch's integration catalog. The agent will query your deals, pipeline stages, and owner data live each time you run the deck.

3 If your board expects accrual-basis figures, connect QuickBooks as a scheduled-sync provider. Starch syncs invoices, bills, payments, and journal entries; note that QuickBooks report views (P&L, Transaction List) are temporarily unavailable, but entity-level data syncs normally.

4 Open the Runway Analysis app. Review the net burn calculation, 6-month trend, and 24-month projection. Confirm the numbers match what you'd expect — this is your 'is everything wired correctly?' checkpoint before deck day.

5 Open the Investor Reporting app and tell Starch what the quarter looked like: top client wins, any key hires, risks you want to flag. Starch drafts the narrative sections — revenue growth, burn, runway, competitive context — using the synced data as the factual backbone.

6 Type your board deck prompt into Starch, specifying the sections your board expects: financial summary, pipeline, utilization, risks, and asks. Starch assembles a structured draft pulling from your connected data sources.

7 Review the financial slides first. Because Stripe and Plaid are synced on a schedule, the revenue, burn, and runway numbers are current as of this morning — not last month's close. Adjust any categorization that looks off (e.g., a contractor payment miscategorized as software).

8 Add the pipeline section. Starch queries HubSpot live and can show deal count, weighted pipeline, and stage distribution. If you track a custom field — like service line or client segment — tell Starch to break it down that way.

9 Fill in the utilization slide. If you use Float or a similar tool that Starch can reach through browser automation, tell Starch to pull this week's utilization report. Alternatively, paste in the number manually — the deck template is built to accept either.

10 Write the 'asks' section yourself — this is the ten minutes of board prep that actually requires your judgment. Starch drafts the setup; you write the specific requests (intro to a potential enterprise client, feedback on a pricing change, approval of a hire).

11 Export the deck as a PDF or shareable link for distribution to board members ahead of the meeting. Keep the Starch version live so you can answer data questions in real time during the meeting by re-running a query.

12 After each board meeting, save your prompt as a reusable template in Starch. Next quarter, you run the same prompt, review the updated numbers, and spend your two days on client work instead.

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 Meeting — March 31 close

Sample numbers from a real run

Revenue (Stripe, Jan–Mar 2026)	487,000
Revenue (Q4 2025 comparative)	431,000
Net burn (Plaid, Jan–Mar average)	38,500
Cash on hand (Plaid, March 31)	610,000
Weighted pipeline (HubSpot)	290,000
Runway at current burn	15

For the Q1 2026 board meeting, you open Starch the morning of March 31. Runway Analysis shows $610K on hand against a $38,500 average monthly net burn — 15.8 months of runway, up from 14.1 months at year-end because February was a strong collections month. Revenue came in at $487K for the quarter, up 13% versus Q4 2025's $431K, driven by two retainer expansions you closed in January. The Investor Reporting app drafts the narrative: 'Q1 revenue grew 13% quarter-over-quarter, ahead of our internal target of 10%. Net burn improved as two large invoices cleared in February. Weighted pipeline entering Q2 stands at $290K across HubSpot, with three enterprise RFPs expected to close by May.' You edit two sentences, add a line about the senior hire you're planning, and export. Total prep time from opening Starch to sending the pre-read: two hours, including your coffee.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Net revenue by quarter (and quarter-over-quarter growth) — the number your board leads with

Net burn rate and months of runway — especially relevant if you carry payroll for 12 people without a predictable retainer base

Weighted pipeline entering next quarter — how much of next quarter's revenue is already contracted vs. at-risk

Billable utilization rate — the professional services metric that determines whether your headcount is right-sized

Retainer renewal rate — what percentage of last quarter's recurring revenue renewed, and what's at risk this quarter

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Slides + manual data pulls

Zero software cost, but reassembling the deck from Stripe exports, QuickBooks PDFs, and HubSpot screenshots takes 8–12 hours every quarter and the numbers are stale by meeting day.

Notion + Coda as a board doc

Good for collaborative narrative editing, but neither tool connects directly to Stripe or Plaid for live financial data — you're still manually pasting numbers into the template.

Kantata (formerly Mavenlink) or Deltek

Purpose-built for professional services reporting including utilization and project margin, but priced and scoped for 50–200-person firms; implementation takes months and you'll be paying for features you don't need for years.

Visible.vc

Clean investor update tool with good Stripe and QuickBooks integrations, but it's primarily a metrics update format — not a full board deck with pipeline, utilization, and narrative asks sections.

PowerPoint + a finance associate

Works fine if you have a dedicated ops or finance person, but at 12 people you probably don't — this is a founder weekend task, which is exactly the problem Starch is solving.

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

My bookkeeper uses QuickBooks and she's always two weeks behind on closing the month. Will the financial slides be stale?

For cash-basis numbers — what actually hit your bank account — Starch syncs directly from Plaid on a schedule, so those figures are current regardless of when your bookkeeper closes the books. QuickBooks entity-level data (invoices, bills, payments) also syncs on a schedule. The one honest caveat: QuickBooks report views like the P&L and Transaction List are temporarily unavailable due to an upstream connector issue. If your board expects an accrual P&L, you'll need to paste that in manually for now — Starch will note this limitation rather than show you a blank chart.

We track utilization in Float. Can Starch pull that into the deck automatically?

Float isn't in Starch's scheduled-sync providers, but Starch can automate Float through your browser — no API required. Tell Starch to log into Float and pull the current utilization report, and it will do it. Alternatively, you can connect Float from Starch's integration catalog if it's available there, and the agent will query it live when your deck runs. Either way, you're not copying and pasting numbers by hand.

Our board wants a slide on competitive positioning. Can Starch research that?

Yes. The Investor Reporting app includes live competitive research — when you tell Starch what category you're competing in and who your main competitors are, it researches current market context and drafts a competitive summary slide. You review and edit it; Starch writes the first draft. This is one of the parts that normally takes a few hours of Googling and slide-formatting on a Sunday night.

Is Starch SOC 2 Type II certified? My board will ask about data security.

Not yet. Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. If your board or a compliance-minded investor requires SOC 2 certification from every tool in your stack, that's worth flagging. For most 12-person consultancies at the seed or early growth stage, this isn't a blocker — but it's an honest answer and you should have it ready.

Can I use Starch if my pipeline lives in a Google Sheet instead of HubSpot?

Yes. Connect Google Sheets from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live when your deck runs. Tell Starch which columns map to deal name, stage, expected close date, and value, and it will pull and format the pipeline section accordingly. You don't need HubSpot; the sheet you already have works fine.

Will the board deck look professional, or will it look like it came from a chatbot?

Starch generates structured content — the financial narrative, the charts, the section summaries — and the Presentation Agent (currently in development, request beta access) will handle the visual formatting into polished slides. In the meantime, the Investor Reporting output is designed to drop cleanly into your existing Google Slides template, so you keep your firm's visual identity. You're not starting over with a new design tool; you're filling a template that already looks like your brand.