Investor Relations

How to build a quarterly lp report as Small Finance Teams

Investor RelationsFor Small Finance Teams2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Every quarter, your three-person team rebuilds the LP report from scratch. You pull the income statement out of NetSuite or QuickBooks, reconcile cash against Plaid balances and Stripe payouts, manually update the portfolio-company KPI table in a Google Sheet, copy-paste everything into a slide deck, and then spend two days formatting numbers that were already right in the ERP. The CFO redlines the narrative at 10pm the night before it goes out. LPs get it late, or they get a version with a stale cash balance because someone forgot to refresh the Stripe payout tab. The data isn't the problem — it's the three-day assembly job.

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Investor RelationsFor Small Finance Teams2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live LP report that pulls your NetSuite or QuickBooks financials, Stripe revenue, and Plaid cash balances on a schedule — so the numbers are current when you open the draft, not when you started building it.

An Investor Reporting app that formats the quarterly narrative, burn rate, runway, and portfolio KPIs into a polished output you can send directly or drop into slides — in one pass, not three days.

An automated distribution workflow that emails the final report to your LP list on the cadence you set, with a human review gate before anything goes out.

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 Email Agent

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your QuickBooks or NetSuite data on a schedule (20+ entities including invoices, bills, payments, and journal entries), syncs Stripe charges, payouts, and subscriptions on a schedule, and syncs Plaid transactions and balances on a schedule. Gmail connects via scheduled sync so the Email Agent can pull your LP contact list and prior thread history. The Investor Reporting app draws on all four data sources when it generates the report.

Prompts to copy

Build me a quarterly LP report using our NetSuite income statement and balance sheet, Plaid cash balances, and Stripe revenue data. Include: beginning and ending cash, net burn for the quarter, gross margin by segment, runway at current burn, and a three-sentence narrative summary of what drove the variance to plan. Format it for an LP audience — no internal account codes.

Draft an email to our LP distribution list attaching the Q1 2026 investor report. Subject line: '[Fund Name] Q1 2026 Quarterly Update.' Opening paragraph should be two sentences from the CFO. Flag any LP who hasn't opened the last two updates so I can follow up separately.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect QuickBooks or NetSuite to Starch — Starch syncs your chart of accounts, income statement entities, balance sheet, and journal entries on a schedule. You don't touch the ERP again during report prep.

2 Connect Stripe to Starch — Starch syncs charges, subscriptions, and payouts so your revenue and cash-in figures are current without a manual export.

3 Connect Plaid to Starch — Starch syncs your bank balances and categorized transactions so beginning and ending cash are live, not copy-pasted from a Friday afternoon screenshot.

4 Open the Investor Reporting starter app from the Starch App Store. It's pre-wired for Plaid, Stripe, QuickBooks, and NetSuite — you're not building from scratch, you're configuring a template that already knows what an LP wants to see.

5 Tell Starch what you want in plain language: include the quarterly KPIs specific to your fund (DPI, TVPI, portfolio company revenue if relevant, net burn vs. plan). Starch customizes the template to your structure.

6 Run the first draft. Review the narrative Starch generates against the CFO's prior commentary — if your burn narrative usually references a specific cost driver (headcount, cloud costs, a one-time item), tell Starch to include that framing going forward.

7 Spot-check three numbers: ending cash (Plaid), net revenue for the quarter (Stripe), and gross margin (QuickBooks or NetSuite). If any of these are off, the scheduled sync log shows exactly when each source last refreshed.

8 Use the Presentation Agent (currently in development — request beta access) to move the report into slides if your LPs expect a deck format. Until then, the Investor Reporting app exports a formatted PDF or shareable link.

9 Set up the Email Agent to draft the distribution email to your LP list. Tell it to pull contact data from Gmail and flag anyone who hasn't responded to the last quarterly update.

10 Set a human review gate: the Email Agent drafts, you approve before anything sends. This is the step that makes the CFO comfortable with the automation.

11 Schedule the full workflow to run on a fixed cadence — for example, 10 days after quarter-end to give you time for close. Starch triggers the data pull, the report generation, and the draft email automatically.

12 After the first quarter, compare time-on-task: the goal is to get report prep from three days to a few hours of review and approval work.

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

Q1 2026 LP Report — March Close

Sample numbers from a real run

Beginning cash (Plaid, Jan 1)	4,850,000
Net revenue — Stripe (Q1)	1,230,000
Operating expenses — QuickBooks (Q1)	1,640,000
Net burn (Q1)	-410,000
Ending cash (Plaid, Mar 31)	4,440,000
Runway at current burn rate	10
Gross margin (QuickBooks)	0.61

Q1 closed with $4.44M in cash, down $410K from January 1st. Net revenue came in at $1.23M — Starch pulled this directly from Stripe's subscription and charge data, synced through quarter-end. Operating expenses of $1.64M were pulled from QuickBooks entity-level data (bills, payroll journal entries, vendor payments). Gross margin landed at 61%, which the team had flagged as likely to compress due to a new infrastructure contract; Starch's report narrative surfaced that line automatically because the finance lead included 'note any gross margin variance above 2 points' in the original prompt. Runway at current burn is 10.8 months — the report shows this as a formatted callout box, not buried in a table footnote. The whole draft was ready for CFO review two hours after the QuickBooks close was finalized, not two days later.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Net burn rate (quarterly and monthly, vs. plan)

Runway in months at current burn

Gross margin by segment or product line

Ending cash balance reconciled across Plaid, Stripe, and ERP

Days to LP report delivery after quarter-end close

Comparison

What this replaces

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

NetSuite or QuickBooks reports + Google Sheets + manual copy-paste

Your ERP is good at the ledger; it produces reports for accountants, not LP narratives, and every quarter you spend two days reformatting numbers that were already correct.

Fathom or Spotlight Reporting (QuickBooks/Xero add-ons)

Good at financial dashboards for internal use; not built for LP-formatted narrative reports, doesn't connect to Stripe or Plaid natively, and doesn't handle email distribution or custom KPI tables.

Notion or Coda quarterly report templates

Flexible and better-looking than Google Docs, but you're still manually pulling numbers into the template every quarter — the data doesn't come to the doc.

A consultant or fractional CFO to run the quarterly pack

Solves the bandwidth problem but costs $3K–$8K per quarter and creates a dependency on someone who doesn't know your accounts as well as you do.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — investor reporting, email 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

Our LP report uses NetSuite, not QuickBooks. Does Starch support both?

Yes. Starch syncs directly from NetSuite (invoices, expenses, journal entries, balance sheets, income statements) and from QuickBooks (20+ entity types). The Investor Reporting app works with either. If you're mid-migration between the two, Starch can pull from both simultaneously during the transition.

QuickBooks has a P&L report view I usually export. Can Starch use that?

Honest answer: QuickBooks' built-in P&L and Transaction List report views are temporarily disabled in Starch pending a connector fix. Entity-level data — bills, invoices, payments, vendors, journal entries — syncs normally. For most LP report use cases (burn, gross margin, cash), entity-level data is what you actually need. If your workflow depends on QuickBooks' formatted P&L export specifically, flag that and we can walk through the workaround.

We have sensitive LP information. Is Starch SOC 2 certified?

Not yet — Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified as of today. That's worth knowing upfront. If your LPs or compliance requirements need SOC 2 certification before you connect financial data, that's a real constraint. We'd rather you know now than discover it during a due diligence review.

Can Starch send the LP report email directly, or does a human have to approve it?

Both modes work. The default setup in the Email Agent is draft-and-review — Starch prepares the email and you send it. You can also configure it to send automatically on a schedule, but for LP communications most finance teams keep a human approval step. That's the setup we'd recommend until you've run two or three cycles and trust the output.

Our LPs expect a PowerPoint deck, not a formatted report. Does that work?

The Presentation Agent — which builds slide decks from a text description — is currently in development. You can request beta access to get notified when it launches. In the meantime, the Investor Reporting app produces a formatted output you can export to PDF, and many teams use that directly or copy key sections into their existing slide template.

We track portfolio company KPIs in the LP report, not just fund-level financials. Can Starch include that?

Yes. If your portfolio company data lives in a Google Sheet, Airtable, or Notion, connect those from Starch's integration catalog and the agent queries them live when building the report. If the data lives in a portal or dashboard with no API, Starch can automate the browser to pull it — no API needed. Tell Starch exactly which KPIs to include and how to format them in your prompt.

Will this actually save time, or are we just moving the manual work somewhere else?

The honest answer is that the first setup takes a few hours — connecting the data sources, configuring the report template, and tuning the narrative prompts until they match your voice. After that, the time savings are in the quarterly assembly work: pulling numbers, reconciling sources, and building the draft. For a three-person team currently spending two to three days on that work every quarter, the goal is to get it to a few hours of review. We're not going to promise a number — run it once and time yourself.