Investor Relations

How to build a board meeting deck as Small Finance Teams

Investor RelationsFor Small Finance Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Every quarter your team spends roughly three days rebuilding the board deck from scratch. You pull actuals from NetSuite or QuickBooks into a Google Sheet, manually reconcile Stripe MRR against what the ERP shows, copy-paste Plaid cash balances, then wrestle with slide layouts until 11pm the night before the meeting. The CFO marks up last quarter's deck in red and you redo the tables. The CEO asks for gross margin by product line the morning of. You have no single source of truth — just a tangle of exports, pivot tables, and a Slides file with seventeen versions named 'board_deck_Q1_FINAL_v4_CFOAPPROVED.pptx'.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Investor RelationsFor Small Finance Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live Investor Reporting app that pulls actuals directly from QuickBooks or NetSuite, Stripe, and Plaid on a schedule — so your balance sheet, P&L, and cash figures are never stale when you open the deck

A Runway Analysis dashboard that calculates real net burn and 24-month forward cash projections from live Stripe and Plaid data, giving the CFO a defensible number before the board even asks

A Presentation Agent workflow that drafts your board deck structure and narrative from a plain-English description of the quarter, so you're editing a polished first draft instead of building slides from a blank canvas

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 QuickBooks or NetSuite data on a schedule (invoices, bills, payments, vendors, journal entries, income statements, balance sheets). Starch syncs your Stripe data on a schedule (charges, customers, subscriptions, payouts). Starch syncs your Plaid data on a schedule (categorized transactions, balances). All three feed into the Investor Reporting and Runway Analysis apps. Presentation Agent uses the outputs of those apps plus your plain-English description of the quarter to draft the deck. Note: Presentation Agent is currently in development — request beta access to get notified when it launches.

Prompts to copy

Build me a quarterly board reporting app that pulls revenue and subscription data from Stripe, operating expenses and P&L from QuickBooks, and cash balances from Plaid. I need slides covering: (1) cash and runway, (2) revenue vs. budget, (3) gross margin by product line, (4) headcount and opex, (5) Q3 actuals vs. Q2, and (6) key risks and next-quarter plan.

Show me our current net burn rate, runway in months, and a 24-month cash projection. Pull revenue from Stripe and cash outflows from Plaid. Break expenses into payroll, COGS, S&M, and G&A. Flag any month where projected cash drops below 3 months of runway.

Draft a 12-slide board deck for our Q2 2026 board meeting. We beat revenue plan by 6%, gross margin compressed 200bps due to cloud cost overruns, and we closed two enterprise logos. Runway is 18 months. Format it for a 45-minute board session with a CFO-level audience.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect QuickBooks or NetSuite in Starch. Starch syncs your chart of accounts, invoices, bills, payments, and financial statements on a schedule — no manual exports needed at month-end.

2 Connect Stripe. Starch syncs charges, subscriptions, and payouts on a schedule so your MRR and revenue figures match the ERP without you reconciling them manually.

3 Connect Plaid to your operating bank account. Starch syncs categorized transactions and live balances, which feeds both the Runway Analysis dashboard and the cash slide in your board deck.

4 Open the Investor Reporting starter app from the App Store. Fork it and tell Starch which accounts map to COGS, S&M, G&A, and R&D in your specific chart of accounts — one natural-language config step, not a spreadsheet formula overhaul.

5 Tell Starch: 'Build me a gross margin by product line view using QuickBooks revenue and COGS data, segmented by the product tags we use in our invoice line items.' Starch builds the view; you stop answering that CEO Slack message from your cell phone during close week.

6 Open Runway Analysis. Review the net burn calculation — Starch pulls 6 months of Plaid outflows and Stripe inflows and shows you the trend, not a single-month average. Adjust the projection assumptions if your hiring plan changed.

7 Two weeks before the board meeting, write a plain-English summary of the quarter: what you beat, what you missed, what changed in the cost structure, what the key risks are. Paste it into Presentation Agent with a prompt describing the deck structure you need.

8 Presentation Agent returns a drafted deck. Review the financial slides against the live Investor Reporting numbers — they should match because both apps are reading from the same synced data sources.

9 Send the CFO the Investor Reporting link a week before the board meeting so they can review actuals, add commentary, and flag any reclassifications before you finalize slides — not the night before.

10 On the morning of the board meeting, refresh the Runway Analysis dashboard. If cash balances or Stripe MRR updated overnight, the deck reflects it — you're not re-exporting a spreadsheet at 7am.

11 After the meeting, use the Investor Reporting app to send a follow-up update to your investor list with the same metrics, formatted as a narrative summary — closing the loop without rebuilding anything from scratch.

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 Prep — June close, deck due July 14

Sample numbers from a real run

MRR (Stripe, synced)	312,000
Net burn — last 3-month avg (Plaid)	-187,000
Cash on hand (Plaid, as of July 1)	3,380,000
Gross margin (QuickBooks actuals)	58
Runway at current burn (months)	18
Revenue vs. budget variance	6

The Q2 close finished on July 8. With QuickBooks syncing on a schedule, the finance team had P&L actuals by July 9 without running a manual export. Stripe showed $312k MRR — up 11% quarter-over-quarter — but gross margin came in at 58%, down 200bps from Q1 because AWS cloud costs overran by $34k. Plaid showed $3.38M cash on hand. Runway Analysis calculated 18 months of runway on a $187k average monthly net burn, which is the number the board will ask for in the first five minutes. The team typed a 4-sentence summary of the quarter into Presentation Agent — beat revenue by 6%, margin compression from cloud, closed Acme Corp and Beta Industries as enterprise logos, runway healthy — and got back a 12-slide first draft in minutes. The CFO spent 90 minutes editing narrative rather than rebuilding tables. The deck was approved by July 13. Total finance team time on board prep: one day instead of three.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Net burn rate (3-month trailing average, not single-month)

Runway in months at current burn

MRR and revenue vs. budget variance

Gross margin by product line (the one the CEO asks about mid-close every quarter)

Days to close — how many business days from quarter-end to board-ready financials

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Sheets + Google Slides (manual rebuild)

You keep full control of every cell, but rebuilding from scratch each quarter takes 2-3 days, errors creep in when you paste across files, and the deck is stale the moment you export it.

Mosaic or Cube (FP&A platforms)

Purpose-built for FP&A modeling with stronger scenario and headcount planning, but they're priced for larger finance teams and don't generate the board narrative or investor update alongside the numbers.

Notion AI or Coda with manual data entry

Good for collaborative narrative drafting, but you're still manually entering the actuals — there's no live sync from QuickBooks, Stripe, or Plaid, so the numbers lag your close.

Hex or Sigma (BI tools)

Powerful for ad hoc financial analysis by engineers or analysts who write SQL, but not designed for a 3-person finance team that needs a board-ready deck, not a query editor.

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 replace NetSuite or QuickBooks as our ERP?

No. Starch syncs your NetSuite or QuickBooks data on a schedule and lets you build the surfaces your ERP can't — board decks, cash dashboards, gross margin views by product line. Your ledger stays in your ERP. Starch is the layer between the ERP and everything the CFO actually wants to look at.

QuickBooks has a P&L report already — why do I need Starch for board reporting?

The built-in QuickBooks P&L is fine for your accountant. It doesn't combine with Stripe MRR, doesn't show 24-month runway from Plaid cash balances, and it definitely doesn't write a narrative summary of the quarter or generate slides. Note: QuickBooks report views (the built-in P&L and Transaction List views) are temporarily unavailable in Starch pending a connector fix, but entity-level data — invoices, bills, vendors, payments, journal entries — syncs normally, and Starch builds your board views from those.

When is Presentation Agent available?

Presentation Agent is currently in development. You can request beta access on the Starch site to get notified when it launches. In the meantime, the Investor Reporting app handles the financial metrics and narrative summary, and you can describe a custom deck structure to Starch to build a presentation app around your specific board format.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We share financials through this.

Starch is not yet SOC 2 Type II certified. If your security review requires SOC 2 Type II before connecting financial systems, that's a real constraint to evaluate. Starch is working toward certification; it's worth checking current status directly with the team.

We use NetSuite, not QuickBooks. Does that work?

Yes. Starch syncs your NetSuite data on a schedule — invoices, expenses, journal entries, balance sheets, and income statements. The Investor Reporting starter app supports NetSuite as a primary connection. You'd tell Starch how your NetSuite segments or subsidiaries map to the board-level categories you want, and it builds the view accordingly.

Can Starch pull data from Ramp or Bill.com for the board deck?

Ramp and Bill.com are reachable from Starch's integration catalog of 3,000+ apps; the agent queries them live when your app runs. If you need AP spend from Ramp in the board deck alongside your QuickBooks actuals and Stripe revenue, describe the combined view to Starch and it builds it. The data is queried live rather than stored in Starch, which is worth knowing if you want persistent historical archives — for most board prep workflows, live query is exactly what you need.