Investor Relations

How to build an investor kpi dashboard as Professional Services Founders

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

Every quarter, you spend two days pulling numbers that should take two hours. Stripe for invoices, Plaid or your bank feed for cash, QuickBooks for billable expenses, HubSpot for pipeline — none of it talks to each other. Your investors want MRR, runway, utilization, and pipeline coverage in one place; you give them a PDF assembled from four tabs and three exports. The CFO-in-a-spreadsheet approach breaks every time a deal slips or a client pauses a retainer. By the time you've reconciled the numbers, the story is two weeks stale. And you're a 12-person shop, so 'stale' is expensive.

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

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live investor KPI dashboard pulling Stripe revenue, Plaid bank transactions, QuickBooks billables, and HubSpot pipeline into one view — updated automatically, not on the third Thursday of the month when you remember.

An automated monthly investor update that drafts the narrative, populates real numbers from your connected data sources, and sends to your investor list on a schedule you set — no blank-page Fridays.

A runway projection that combines client retainer revenue from Stripe with actual cash outflows from Plaid, so you can answer 'how many months do we have?' without opening a spreadsheet.

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 on a schedule (charges, invoices, subscriptions), your Plaid bank feeds on a schedule (categorized transactions and balances), and your QuickBooks data on a schedule (invoices, bills, payments, journal entries). HubSpot deals and pipeline data are connected from Starch's integration catalog and queried live when the dashboard or automation runs. Gmail is connected for the investor email send, with Slack connected from Starch's integration catalog for draft review notifications.

Prompts to copy

Build me an investor KPI dashboard that pulls MRR and net revenue from Stripe, cash balance and burn from Plaid, billable expenses from QuickBooks, and open pipeline value from HubSpot. Show month-over-month change for each metric and flag anything that moved more than 15% in either direction.

Every first Monday of the month, draft an investor update using last month's Stripe revenue, Plaid cash position, and HubSpot pipeline. Include a three-sentence narrative on what changed, our top client win, and one risk to flag. Email it to my investor list and Slack me the draft first so I can review before it sends.

Show me a 24-month runway projection combining recurring Stripe invoices as revenue and Plaid transaction outflows as expenses, broken down by payroll, software, and client delivery costs. Recalculate daily.

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Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Stripe — Starch syncs your charges, invoices, and subscriptions on a schedule. This becomes the source of truth for MRR, net revenue, and retainer renewal dates.

2 Connect Plaid — Starch syncs your bank account transactions and balances daily, auto-categorized. This replaces the manual bank export you do at month-end and powers your real burn calculation.

3 Connect QuickBooks — Starch syncs 20+ entities including invoices, bills, vendors, and journal entries on a schedule. This covers your billable expense tracking and gives investors the P&L context they ask for.

4 Connect HubSpot from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries your deals, pipeline stages, and contact data live each time the dashboard loads, so pipeline coverage is always current.

5 Connect Gmail so Starch can send the monthly investor update from your address on the schedule you set. Connect Slack from Starch's integration catalog so you get a draft notification before it sends.

6 Start with the Investor Reporting app from the App Store — it pulls Stripe and Plaid out of the box. Then tell Starch: 'Add QuickBooks billable expenses and HubSpot pipeline to this report as two new sections.'

7 Layer in the Runway Analysis app to get the 24-month cash projection. Tell Starch: 'Use Stripe retainer invoices as recurring revenue and Plaid outflows as expenses, broken down by payroll, software, and delivery costs.'

8 Set the KPI thresholds that matter for your investor conversations — for example, 'flag if MRR drops more than 10% month-over-month, if runway falls below 9 months, or if pipeline coverage drops below 2x.'

9 Configure the monthly automation: 'On the first Monday of each month, pull last month's final numbers from Stripe, Plaid, and QuickBooks. Draft a 400-word investor narrative with a top win, one risk, and our runway. Send me a Slack preview by 8am; if I don't respond by noon, send the email to my investor list.'

10 Customize the KPI dashboard view for your board deck format — tell Starch which metrics to show first, which chart style you want, and whether to include the HubSpot pipeline waterfall. Starch rebuilds the layout from your description.

11 Test the full loop with last month's data. Review the auto-drafted narrative for tone — if it's off, tell Starch 'make it more direct, drop the hedging language, and lead with the cash number' and it regenerates.

12 After the first live send, tell Starch what your investors actually asked about, and adjust the dashboard and template to pre-empt those questions next month.

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

March 2026 Close — 12-Person Consultancy, $2.1M ARR

Sample numbers from a real run

Stripe MRR (retainer invoices)	175,000
Net cash (Plaid balance, March 31)	412,000
QuickBooks billable expenses (March)	61,000
HubSpot pipeline (weighted, 60-day)	390,000
Net burn (Plaid outflows minus Stripe inflows)	38,000
Runway at current burn	10

On April 1, Starch runs the monthly job. It pulls $175,000 in March retainer invoices from Stripe — up $12,000 from February because the Meridian Group engagement moved from project to retainer. Plaid shows a closing cash balance of $412,000 across two operating accounts. QuickBooks bills out $61,000 in delivery costs for the month: $38,000 payroll, $14,000 contractor fees, $9,000 software and travel. Net burn lands at $38,000, giving 10.8 months of runway — Starch flags this because it dropped below the 11-month threshold set in the dashboard. HubSpot pipeline shows $390,000 weighted for the next 60 days, which is 2.2x the current monthly revenue target, so no flag there. By 8:05am, the founder has a Slack with the draft investor update: it leads with the Meridian retainer win, notes the runway dip and what would need to close to extend it past 14 months, and lists the three proposals in final stages. The founder edits one sentence, replies 'send,' and it goes to six investors by 8:12am. Total founder time: under 10 minutes.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

MRR by client and engagement type (retainer vs. project vs. time-and-materials) — because your revenue mix changes how investors read your stability

Net cash burn vs. billable revenue, month-over-month — the number that actually tells you when to raise or cut

Runway in months at current burn rate — what every investor asks first

Weighted pipeline coverage ratio (pipeline value ÷ monthly revenue target) — the leading indicator your utilization rate lags

Retainer renewal rate and average retainer age — the number your PSA tool would track if you could afford one

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Kantata / Projector / Deltek

Built for 200-person firms with a dedicated ops team to run them; implementation takes a quarter and pricing assumes you have a finance department.

Manual Stripe + QuickBooks + HubSpot exports into Google Sheets

Free and flexible, but someone's Friday disappears every month reconciling it, and it's stale by the time you send it.

Fathom or Mosaic (financial dashboards)

Good at pulling QuickBooks or Xero data into clean charts, but they don't touch your HubSpot pipeline, can't generate a narrative investor update, and can't automate the send.

Notion + manual updates

Works fine for storing the update after you write it; doesn't pull a single number automatically or draft a word of the narrative.

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.

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

My financials are in QuickBooks but my bank is connected through Plaid — do I need both?

Yes, and that's actually the setup that gives you the most complete picture. Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule for the accounting-layer view — invoices, bills, vendor payments — and syncs Plaid separately for real cash position and transaction-level burn. They cover different things. QuickBooks tells you what's recognized; Plaid tells you what's actually in the account. Both feed the dashboard.

Can Starch pull QuickBooks P&L reports directly?

Starch syncs QuickBooks entity data — invoices, bills, payments, vendors, journal entries — on a schedule, and can derive a P&L view from those. The QuickBooks report views (the pre-built P&L and Transaction List reports inside QuickBooks) are temporarily unavailable due to an upstream connector issue. Entity-level sync is working normally, so your core financials are covered.

What if my investors want a specific format — like a table they've always received?

Tell Starch: 'Format the investor update with a KPI table at the top in this structure: [paste your old table headers], then a three-paragraph narrative, then a bullet list of next-month priorities.' It adapts the template to match. You can also fork the Investor Reporting app and customize it so every future update uses your format.

Is this SOC 2 certified? My investors or clients may ask.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If that's a hard requirement for your investor data room or client contracts, it's worth knowing upfront. There's no on-prem or self-hosted option either. For most 12-person professional services firms sending monthly investor updates, this isn't a blocker — but it's an honest answer.

We track utilization in Harvest and Float, not in HubSpot or Stripe. Can Starch connect to those?

Harvest and Float are reachable from Starch's integration catalog of 3,000+ apps, queried live when your dashboard or automation runs. Tell Starch: 'Pull billable hours by consultant from Harvest and capacity data from Float, and add a utilization section to my investor dashboard showing billed hours versus available hours this month.' If those tools don't expose everything you need through their APIs, Starch can also automate them through your browser — no API required.

How long does it take to set this up?

Connecting Stripe, Plaid, QuickBooks, HubSpot, Gmail, and Slack takes 20–30 minutes of OAuth flows and scoping. The Investor Reporting and Runway Analysis apps are pre-built starting points — you'd be editing, not starting from scratch. The first complete investor update, including the automated send configuration, typically takes an afternoon to get right: one run to check the numbers, one revision to the narrative tone, one test send. After that it runs itself.