Investor Relations

How to build a board meeting deck as Small Investor Relations Teams

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

Your Q4 board meeting is in 11 days. You have two people, five data sources, and a 40-slide deck template that was last updated when the company had a CFO who cared about slide consistency. You're manually pulling MRR from Stripe, burn from QuickBooks, headcount from Paylocity, and pipeline from HubSpot — pasting each into a Google Slides master that breaks whenever someone touches the chart formatting. Your CEO wants to see runway sensitivity and the board wants cohort retention. Neither is in the template. You'll spend 14 hours on this deck, 11 of them in spreadsheets, and you'll still be fixing a pie chart at midnight the night before.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

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

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live board deck that pulls financial, headcount, and pipeline data directly from your connected systems — so the numbers in your slides are never manually typed

A narrative layer where you describe what happened this quarter in plain language and Starch drafts the commentary, consistent with your previous board communications

An exportable presentation (PowerPoint, PDF, or shareable link) your CEO can review and annotate before the board even sees it

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 data on a schedule (invoices, bills, payments, journal entries), your Stripe data on a schedule (charges, subscriptions, MRR), your Plaid bank feeds on a schedule (categorized transactions, balances), and your Paylocity headcount data on a schedule (employees, pay runs). HubSpot pipeline data is queried live from Starch's integration catalog when your board deck app runs. LinkedIn context for competitive slides is pulled through browser automation — no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Pull Q2 2026 financials: net burn from QuickBooks, MRR and net revenue retention from Stripe, cash balance from Plaid. Show 6-month burn trend, 18-month runway projection at current pace, and a scenario where we hire 3 engineers in August.

Generate a 12-slide board update deck for our June 2026 board meeting. Slides needed: executive summary, Q2 financial performance (burn, runway, MRR growth), headcount and hiring plan, pipeline and bookings summary, key wins and risks this quarter, and asks from the board. Use the same tone as our March 2026 update. Export as PowerPoint.

Draft a 3-paragraph narrative for the financial section. Q2 net burn was $680K, down from $740K in Q1. MRR grew 8% QoQ to $1.4M. Runway is 19 months. Highlight the burn improvement and explain that the runway extension came from faster collections, not slower hiring.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect QuickBooks, Stripe, Plaid, and Paylocity as scheduled-sync providers — Starch pulls your financials, cash movements, and headcount automatically and keeps them current so you're never copy-pasting from a stale export.

2 Connect HubSpot from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can query live pipeline data — stage-weighted ARR, deals closing this quarter, average sales cycle — when your board deck runs.

3 Open the Investor Reporting app and scope it to the current quarter: tell Starch which metrics the board cares about (net burn, runway, MRR growth, NRR, headcount vs. plan) and it assembles the financial narrative from your connected data.

4 Run the Runway Analysis app to generate the cash projection section: current burn rate, 18-to-24-month runway at current pace, and at least one hiring scenario your CEO will ask about during the dry run.

5 Describe the narrative context in plain language — what happened this quarter, what the big wins were, what the risks are — and Starch drafts the board commentary in the same tone you used last time, pulling in the live numbers automatically.

6 Use the Presentation Agent (currently in beta — request access) to turn the financial data and narrative into a structured slide deck: tell Starch how many slides you need, which sections to include, and any design constraints (font, color, logo placement), and it builds the full deck.

7 Export to PowerPoint and share with your CEO for review at least five days before the board meeting — not two nights before.

8 Iterate on individual slides by typing what needs to change: 'Move the runway chart to slide 4, add a sensitivity table showing runway at $600K, $700K, and $800K monthly burn, and update the narrative to reflect the August hiring plan.'

9 For any competitive context slides, instruct Starch to pull pricing or product updates from competitor websites through browser automation — no API needed, it navigates the pages directly.

10 Lock the deck, export the final PDF, and push it to your board data room — if you use DocSend or Intralinks, Starch can automate the upload through browser automation so you're not manually logging into another portal at midnight.

11 After the board meeting, use the same connected data to generate an LP update letter: the numbers are already live in Starch, so the letter takes a prompt, not a day.

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

June 2026 Board Meeting — Q2 Close

Sample numbers from a real run

Q2 Net Burn (QuickBooks + Plaid)	680,000
Q2 MRR (Stripe)	1,400,000
Cash on Hand (Plaid balance)	12,900,000
Runway at Current Burn (months)	19
Pipeline — Stage-Weighted ARR (HubSpot live query)	3,200,000
Headcount EOP (Paylocity)	47

Two days before the June board meeting, your IR team opens Starch. QuickBooks has already synced Q2 bills and payments; Stripe has MRR and subscription data current through June 30; Plaid has the June 28 bank balance of $12.9M. You type: 'Build the Q2 financial slides. Net burn was $680K in Q2, down from $740K in Q1. Show 6-month burn trend, 19-month runway at current pace, and a scenario where we add 3 engineers starting August 1 — that scenario burns $760K/month and cuts runway to 17 months.' Starch pulls the historical burn from QuickBooks and Plaid, generates the trend chart, and models the hiring scenario. The Runway Analysis app surfaces the projection table. You add: 'Draft the financial narrative. Highlight that burn improvement came from faster AR collections — DSO dropped from 52 to 38 days — not from cutting the hiring plan.' Starch drafts three paragraphs, consistent with the cautious-but-confident tone from your March board letter. The Presentation Agent builds 12 slides in the right order. You export to PowerPoint, fix one chart label, and send to your CEO by Thursday morning — four days before the board, not four hours.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Net burn and gross burn by month, trending over 6 quarters

Runway in months at current pace and under 1-2 hiring scenarios

MRR growth rate QoQ and net revenue retention (NRR) from Stripe

Stage-weighted pipeline ARR and pipeline coverage ratio from HubSpot

Headcount vs. hiring plan and payroll as % of total burn from Paylocity

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Slides + manual spreadsheet exports

Free and familiar, but every number is manually typed — one QuickBooks or Stripe export that's a day stale makes your board materials wrong, and you find out during the CFO's review.

Pitch or Beautiful.ai

Better design output than raw Google Slides, but neither connects to QuickBooks, Plaid, or Stripe — you're still copy-pasting your financial data in, which is the part that takes 11 hours.

Juniper Square or Q4 IR platform

Purpose-built for LP and investor communications at scale, but $50K+ annually and assumes a dedicated IR-ops analyst; doesn't help you build a board deck faster, it helps you distribute one more professionally.

Notion AI or ChatGPT with manual paste

Can draft narrative commentary if you paste in your numbers, but it has no live connection to QuickBooks, Stripe, or Plaid — you're still doing the data assembly yourself before the AI touches it.

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

Is Starch SOC 2 Type II certified? We have board members who will ask about data security before we connect QuickBooks.

Not yet — Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If that's a hard requirement for connecting your accounting system, it's worth knowing upfront. That said, the scheduled-sync connections to QuickBooks, Plaid, and Stripe are read-only by default, and Starch doesn't store credentials beyond the OAuth token. The SOC 2 process is on the roadmap.

QuickBooks has P&L and Transaction List report views. Can Starch pull those for the financial slides?

QuickBooks report views — including P&L, Transaction List, and Vendor Expenses — are temporarily disabled pending a fix on the upstream connector. Entity-level data syncs normally: invoices, bills, payments, vendors, journal entries, and journal entries. For most board decks, entity-level data is enough to calculate net burn and MRR trends accurately; you just won't get a pre-formatted P&L report view until the fix ships.

The Presentation Agent is listed as 'currently in development.' What can we do today while we wait for beta access?

The Investor Reporting app is live today and handles the financial data pull, narrative drafting, and formatted output — it's built specifically for the numbers-plus-commentary section that takes most of your time. The Runway Analysis app gives you the cash projection and scenario modeling. For the actual slide deck shell today, you'd export the Investor Reporting output and drop it into your existing Google Slides or PowerPoint template. The Presentation Agent beta will handle the full deck build end-to-end; request access to get notified when it opens.

We use NetSuite, not QuickBooks. Does Starch connect to it?

Yes. Starch syncs your NetSuite data on a schedule — invoices, expenses, journal entries, balance sheets, and income statements. The Investor Reporting app in the App Store includes NetSuite as a primary connection alongside Plaid, Stripe, and QuickBooks, so your board deck financial data can come from NetSuite the same way it would from QuickBooks.

Our board data room lives in DocSend. Can Starch push the final deck there automatically?

Yes, through browser automation. Starch can log into DocSend through your browser and upload the exported PDF or PowerPoint — no DocSend API needed. You'd set this up as an automation: 'When I mark the board deck as final, upload it to the Q2 2026 folder in our DocSend data room and Slack me the shareable link.' The same pattern works for Intralinks or any other web-based data room.

How does Starch keep the board deck narrative consistent with our previous communications? We've spent years establishing a specific tone with our board.

When you prompt Starch to draft commentary, you can reference previous outputs directly — 'use the same tone as our March 2026 board letter' — and provide that letter as context. Starch uses it as a style reference for sentence length, hedging language, and the balance between optimism and candor that your board has come to expect. You still review and edit before anything goes out; Starch drafts, you own the voice.