Strategy & Planning

How to build an investor pitch deck as Small Investor Relations Teams

Strategy & PlanningFor Small Investor Relations Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

You're two people running an IR operation that assumes five. Every quarter, building the LP pitch update or a new investor deck means manually exporting CSVs from QuickBooks or NetSuite, pulling cash balances from Plaid or your bank portal, copying MRR figures out of Stripe, and then spending two days in Google Slides trying to make it look like your GP didn't do it at midnight. The institutional platforms — Juniper Square, Addepar — assume you have a dedicated IR-ops analyst to maintain them. You don't. The deck goes out late, the numbers are from last week, and you're already behind on the next capital call communication.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Strategy & PlanningFor Small Investor Relations Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A pitch deck generator that pulls live financials from QuickBooks, NetSuite, Stripe, and Plaid and drafts a narrative-ready investor deck in response to a plain-English description of what happened this period.

A scenario analysis layer so any LP question about 'what if you slow hiring' or 'when do you break even' can be answered with a chart, not a spreadsheet you build from scratch.

A reusable investor reporting cadence — connected to your actual financial data — so the next deck starts from a live baseline, not last quarter's exported CSV.

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 Scenario Analysis Presentation Agent

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule (invoices, bills, payments, journal entries), syncs your NetSuite data on a schedule (income statements, balance sheets, journal entries), and syncs your Stripe and Plaid data on a schedule (MRR, charges, transactions, cash balances). LP portal data from DocSend, Intralinks, or Juniper Square is automated through your browser — no API needed. Presentation Agent (currently in beta — request access) assembles slide layouts and exports to PowerPoint, PDF, or a shareable link on top of this live data.

Prompts to copy

Build me an investor update deck for Q1 2026 — pull our burn rate and runway from Plaid and Stripe, include MRR growth month over month, and write a three-sentence narrative on what drove the quarter. Format it as a 10-slide deck with a cover, financial summary, KPI page, and a risks-and-opportunities section.

Create a scenario analysis comparing three fundraising timelines: raise in Q3 2026 at current burn, delay to Q1 2027 with a 15% hiring reduction, and delay to Q1 2027 with flat headcount. Show runway and break-even for each using our actual Stripe revenue and Plaid cash balance as the baseline.

Generate a 6-slide LP progress update for our Series B investors — include commitment pacing against the $40M target, portfolio company KPIs pulled from our reporting data, and a one-paragraph narrative on fund performance this quarter.

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 financials on a schedule so every deck starts from current data, not a stale export.

2 Connect Stripe and Plaid so Starch has live MRR, cash balances, and transaction-level burn data without you manually pulling reports.

3 Open the Investor Reporting app from the App Store and fork it for your fund's cadence — quarterly LP updates instead of monthly, your metric names, your narrative tone.

4 Describe the deck you need in plain English: the period, the audience (LP update vs. new investor pitch vs. board pack), and any context about what happened this quarter that the numbers won't capture on their own.

5 Starch drafts the deck — burn rate, runway, MRR growth, top wins, risks — pulling numbers directly from your synced financial data and filling in narrative summaries consistent with how you wrote the last one.

6 Open the Scenario Analysis app and set your baseline from the same Stripe and Plaid sync. Add the scenarios your GP or CFO keeps asking about: slower growth, delayed raise, headcount freeze.

7 Embed the scenario chart into the deck — LP questions about J-curves or commitment pacing now have a visual answer you can drop into any slide.

8 For LP portal data — commitment balances, distribution waterfalls, access logs in DocSend or Intralinks — set up a browser automation: Starch logs into the portal and pulls the data you need on whatever schedule you set, no API required.

9 Review the draft, make edits in natural language ('make the risks section more specific, we had a key-person departure in March'), and iterate without rebuilding from scratch.

10 Export the final deck to PowerPoint or PDF for DocSend, or share via link directly — whichever your LP distribution process requires.

11 Save the prompt and data config as a reusable template so next quarter's deck starts from a live baseline, not a blank slide.

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 LP Quarterly Update — $100M ARR Fund

Sample numbers from a real run

Beginning cash (Plaid)	4,200,000
Net new MRR (Stripe)	310,000
Operating burn (QuickBooks)	890,000
Ending runway (calculated)	18
Committed capital vs. $40M target	31,500,000

In Q1 2026, the fund closed March with $4.2M cash on hand and $310K in net new MRR — a 12% improvement over Q4. Starch pulled the burn figure ($890K) directly from QuickBooks entity-level data (invoices, payments, payroll entries) and cross-referenced it against Plaid transactions to reconcile intercompany transfers that had inflated the prior quarter's reported burn by $45K. The IR team described the quarter to Starch in two sentences — 'We had strong top-of-funnel but one portfolio company missed its Q1 milestone; we want to frame it as a timing issue, not a performance issue' — and Starch drafted the risks section accordingly. The scenario analysis showing 18-month runway under flat headcount versus 11 months under the original hiring plan was embedded as slide 7 and answered the two LP questions that came up in the Q4 call before they were asked. Total time from data-to-deck: four hours instead of two days.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Runway in months (calculated from synced Plaid cash balance and QuickBooks burn rate, updated on schedule)

Net new MRR and MRR growth rate month-over-month (from Stripe)

Committed capital vs. target ($40M or fund-specific) and pacing against close timeline

LP response rate and open rate on quarterly update distribution (tracked via DocSend or browser automation against LP contact list)

Time-to-deck: hours from period close to LP delivery, tracked as an operational efficiency metric by the IR team

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Juniper Square / Addepar / iLevel

Built for dedicated IR-ops analysts and full fund admin workflows; starts at $50K+/year and assumes data entry discipline your two-person team doesn't have bandwidth for — Starch connects to the data you already have in QuickBooks, NetSuite, Stripe, and Plaid and lets you build the specific surfaces you actually use.

Google Slides + manual CSV export

Free and familiar, but every deck means re-pulling exports, re-formatting tables, and rewriting narrative from scratch — Starch keeps the data connection live so the next deck starts from current numbers.

Canva or Beautiful.ai

Good for design polish on static decks, but there's no live data connection — you're still copying numbers in by hand and the deck is outdated the moment you export it.

Excel / Google Sheets scenario models

Scenario models built in spreadsheets are powerful but brittle — one changed assumption breaks three other formulas, and they're disconnected from your actual financial data; Starch's Scenario Analysis app uses your live Stripe and Plaid baseline so the model reflects what's actually happening.

Q4 IR platform

Purpose-built for public company IR and investor communications at scale; strong for managing analyst relationships and earnings workflows, but priced and scoped for a full IR team — not a two-person operation that also needs to build financial models and manage a data room.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — investor reporting, scenario planning, 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 connect to Juniper Square or Addepar directly?

Not via a scheduled sync today. If your fund admin portal is web-based, Starch can automate it through your browser — logging in, pulling commitment balances or distribution data — without needing a formal API. For QuickBooks, NetSuite, Stripe, and Plaid, Starch syncs the data directly on a schedule.

QuickBooks is the source of truth for our fund financials. How deep is that connection?

Starch syncs 20+ QuickBooks entities on a schedule — invoices, bills, payments, vendors, journal entries, and more. One honest caveat: QuickBooks report views (P&L summary, Transaction List, Vendor Expenses) are temporarily unavailable pending a connector fix. Entity-level data syncs normally, so burn calculations and cash reconciliation work — you just can't pull a pre-formatted P&L report view directly today.

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. It's one of the 16 providers with a dedicated data pipeline, so the depth is the same as QuickBooks.

How does the Presentation Agent work, and is it available now?

Presentation Agent builds slide decks from a plain-English description — '10-slide LP update with our Q1 financials and a scenario analysis' — and produces layouts with data visualizations you can export to PowerPoint, PDF, or a shareable link. It's currently in development; you can request beta access to get notified when it launches. In the meantime, the Investor Reporting app generates structured reports and narrative summaries you can paste into your existing deck template.

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

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your LPs or compliance team requires SOC 2, that's worth knowing upfront. Starch is building toward it, but we won't claim it before it's done.

Our GP also uses a spreadsheet model they built in 2019. Can Starch replace that?

The Scenario Analysis app connects your live Stripe and Plaid data as the baseline and lets you run what-if comparisons — slower growth, hiring changes, fundraising timing — without rebuilding the model every time. It won't import your GP's existing Excel file, but for forward-looking scenario work it covers the common cases. If your GP needs a very bespoke model, you can describe it in natural language and Starch will build a custom app around it.

We have 200+ LP contacts across three CRMs — our CFO's spreadsheet, HubSpot, and an old Salesforce instance. Can Starch pull from all of them?

HubSpot syncs directly on a schedule. Salesforce and other CRMs are reachable from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries them live when your app needs the data. For your CFO's spreadsheet, if it's in Google Sheets, that's also in the integration catalog. You can describe a unified LP contact view and Starch will build it from all three sources.