Finance & FP&A

How to forecast runway and months of cash as DTC Brand Founders

Finance & FP&AFor DTC Brand Founders2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Your cash position lives in three places that never agree: a Shopify dashboard that shows revenue but not ad spend, a bank account you check manually every few days, and a Google Sheet your ops person built six months ago that breaks whenever someone adds a row. You're spending on Meta and TikTok ads, paying 3PLs, ordering inventory 90 days out, and trying to figure out if you have enough runway to survive a slow Q3 without raising. Nobody told you the answer — you estimate it every week from memory and hope you're not off by a month.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Finance & FP&AFor DTC Brand Founders2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live burn rate and runway dashboard that pulls your actual bank transactions from Plaid and revenue from Stripe, updates daily, and tells you exactly how many months of cash you have left without opening a spreadsheet

A side-by-side scenario model showing what happens to runway if your CAC stays elevated another quarter, if you pause Meta spend, or if you push your next inventory reorder by 60 days

Automated weekly cash summaries delivered to Slack so your whole team — ops, finance, co-founder — sees the same number at the same time, pulled from the same source

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

Runway Analysis Scenario Analysis

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Plaid bank transactions and balances on a schedule — categorized spend lands in Starch daily so your burn calc is never stale. Starch connects directly to Stripe on a schedule for revenue, charges, and payouts. Slack is connected from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live to deliver your Monday summary. No manual uploads, no waiting for a bookkeeper.

Prompts to copy

Connect my Plaid bank feed and Stripe account, then build me a runway dashboard that shows net burn for the last 6 months, my current monthly burn broken out by ad spend, 3PL fees, payroll, and COGS, and a 12-month cash projection at my current pace

Build me a scenario model where the baseline uses my actual Plaid and Stripe data. Let me toggle: (1) Meta ad spend up 30%, (2) Meta ad spend paused entirely, (3) a new inventory buy of $80,000 in August. Show runway and break-even month for each scenario side by side

Every Monday at 8am, send me a Slack message with current cash balance, this month's burn-to-date versus last month's pace, and how many months of runway I have left

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect your business bank account through Plaid — Starch syncs your transactions and balances on a schedule, categorized automatically. If you run multiple accounts (operating, ad spend, reserve), connect all of them so burn is complete.

2 Connect Stripe so Starch pulls your actual revenue, refunds, and payouts on a schedule. For DTC brands processing through Shopify Payments, Stripe is typically the underlying processor — confirm which account your payouts land in.

3 Open the Runway Analysis app from the Starch App Store. It calculates real net burn from your Plaid and Stripe data out of the box — 6-month historical trend, expense breakdown by category, and a 24-month forward projection at current pace.

4 Customize the expense categories to match how you actually think about your business: break out 'ad spend' (Meta, TikTok, Google) from 'fulfillment' (3PL fees, shipping), 'inventory' (supplier payments), and 'overhead' (payroll, SaaS, rent). Tell Starch which transaction descriptions map to which bucket.

5 Open the Scenario Analysis app and set your baseline — Starch pulls the same Plaid and Stripe data so your starting point is your real current position, not a number you typed in.

6 Build your first scenario: what does runway look like if your blended CAC stays 20% above target for another full quarter? Adjust the revenue assumption down and watch the break-even month shift.

7 Build a second scenario around your next inventory buy. DTC brands carry inventory risk that SaaS founders don't — model the cash impact of your next PO before you wire the deposit.

8 Build a third scenario for a fundraising timing decision: if you raise in month 6 versus month 9, how much runway buffer do you have at each point? Use this to anchor your next investor conversation.

9 Set up the Monday morning Slack automation. Tell Starch: 'Every Monday at 8am, post to #founders-update with current cash balance, this month's burn-to-date, and months of runway at current pace.' Starch queries your Plaid and Stripe data live and formats the message.

10 Share the dashboard link with your co-founder and ops lead. Everyone sees the same number from the same source — stops the 'I thought we had more than that' conversation that happens before every board call.

11 Run the scenario model again before any major spend decision: a new influencer partnership, a pre-order production run, a paid acquisition test on a new channel. Two minutes to see the runway impact before you commit.

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 inventory decision — DTC apparel brand, $2.1M ARR

Sample numbers from a real run

Cash (operating account)	380,000
Cash (ad spend account)	45,000
Monthly Stripe revenue (avg, last 3 months)	175,000
Monthly ad spend — Meta + TikTok	62,000
Monthly 3PL + shipping	28,000
Monthly payroll (5 FTE)	41,000
Monthly inventory reorders (avg)	35,000
Monthly SaaS + overhead	9,000
Net monthly burn	-175,000
Gross burn (expenses only)	175,000
Runway at current pace (months)	2.4

The founder thought they had about 5 months of runway. The Runway Analysis app told a different story: $425K total cash, $175K monthly gross burn, $175K monthly revenue — net burn was effectively zero on average, but two things were hiding a real problem. First, a $90K supplier payment for the summer collection was hitting in 6 weeks and wasn't in the monthly average. Second, Meta CPMs had climbed 18% over 3 months and revenue hadn't kept pace — the last 6-week burn trend was $22K/month net negative, not zero. Running the scenario model with the inventory PO factored in dropped available cash to $290K before the summer selling season started. The 'pause Meta spend for 8 weeks' scenario showed they could fund the PO and stay above a $200K cash floor — enough to make the call confidently instead of guessing. The Monday Slack update now flags any week where trailing 4-week burn exceeds $25K net so the team sees it before it compounds.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Months of runway at current net burn (updated daily, not monthly)

Net burn rate — trailing 4-week average, not a single-month snapshot

Ad spend as a percentage of revenue (CAC efficiency pressure shows up here before it hits the P&L)

Cash impact of next inventory PO versus current cash-on-hand

Break-even month under each scenario (flat growth, reduced ad spend, delayed reorder)

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Sheets manual model

You own the logic and it's free, but someone has to update it — and when the formula breaks the week before a board call, you're rebuilding it at midnight

QuickBooks + accountant monthly close

Accurate and audit-ready, but you're looking at last month's numbers two weeks into this month — too slow for spend decisions you're making daily

Mosaic or Runway (financial planning tools)

Purpose-built for financial modeling with clean UIs, but they're priced for venture-backed teams with a finance hire and don't connect ad spend, 3PL costs, or inventory buys the way you actually run the business

Shopify analytics + bank statements

Shopify shows revenue but doesn't know about your Plaid cash position, your Meta spend, or your supplier payments — you're mentally adding three dashboards every time you want to know if you're okay

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — runway analysis, scenario planning 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

My revenue runs through Shopify Payments, not Stripe directly. Can Starch still pull my revenue?

Shopify Payments settles to your bank account, which Plaid captures — so your net deposits show up in your Plaid transaction feed. Starch's scheduled Stripe sync works best if Stripe is your processor. If you're on Shopify Payments, your bank feed via Plaid covers the revenue side; connect Shopify from Starch's integration catalog for order-level data the agent can query live.

My ad spend goes through a credit card, not a debit from my bank. Will that show up in Plaid?

Yes — Plaid connects to credit card accounts as well as bank accounts. Connect the card you use for Meta and TikTok spend and Starch will categorize those transactions alongside your bank outflows. Tell Starch which transaction descriptions are ad spend and it'll break the category out separately in your burn dashboard.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I'm handing over bank credentials.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified yet — that's an honest answer. Plaid's bank connection uses read-only OAuth; Starch never sees your banking username or password. If SOC 2 is a hard requirement for your company's security policy today, that's worth knowing upfront.

My bookkeeper closes the books in QuickBooks. Can I use that instead of Plaid for expense data?

Yes — Starch connects directly to QuickBooks on a schedule and syncs invoices, bills, payments, vendors, and journal entries. One honest caveat: QuickBooks report views like the P&L and Transaction List are temporarily disabled pending a connector fix. Entity-level data syncs normally, which covers most of what Runway Analysis needs.

The scenario model sounds useful, but I change assumptions constantly. Is this going to take time to maintain?

You're not maintaining a spreadsheet formula — you're telling Starch what to model in plain language. 'What if I pause Meta spend for 8 weeks and push my August reorder to October?' takes one prompt, not an afternoon rebuilding a model. The baseline always pulls from live Plaid and Stripe data so you're not updating inputs manually either.

Can I build something that tracks inventory cash impact, not just ad spend and payroll?

Yes. Tell Starch: 'Build me a dashboard that shows my monthly cash outflows broken out by: ad spend, 3PL and shipping, supplier payments, payroll, and SaaS. Flag any month where supplier payments exceed $50K so I can see inventory cash spikes ahead of time.' Starch builds it from your Plaid transaction data. Supplier payments show up as bank debits — Plaid captures them, and you tell Starch how to categorize the payee.