Finance & FP&A

How to forecast runway and months of cash as Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators

Finance & FP&AFor Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You close every cohort month by opening four browser tabs: Stripe for revenue, your bank's website for the actual balance, a Google Sheet you built two years ago and half-trust, and Notion to cross-reference what you committed to spend on course production. You manually copy numbers between them. The sheet calculates burn wrong because it averages your quietest month against a launch month. You genuinely do not know whether you have 6 months of runway or 14. Your accountant sends a QuickBooks summary quarterly; that's too slow when you're deciding whether to hire a course manager in April or push to September.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Finance & FP&AFor Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live runway dashboard that pulls your Stripe revenue and Plaid bank transactions daily — so after every cohort launch or refund, your months-of-cash number updates automatically without opening a spreadsheet

Side-by-side scenario models showing what happens to your runway if you run two cohorts instead of one this quarter, raise your flagship program price by $500, or add a part-time operations hire

A single source of truth for burn that separates course production costs, contractor payments, and software subscriptions — so you stop averaging a $40k launch month against a $6k off-month and calling it your burn rate

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

Runway Analysis and Scenario Analysis both run on Starch's scheduled-sync connections to Stripe (charges, invoices, subscriptions, payouts) and Plaid (categorized transactions, balances). Both data sources sync on a schedule and live in Starch — no manual exports, no waiting for your bookkeeper. If you also use QuickBooks to track contractor invoices or course production expenses, Starch can sync that too.

Prompts to copy

Connect my Stripe account and my Plaid bank feed. Build me a runway dashboard that shows net burn by month for the last 6 months, my current cash balance, and how many months of runway I have at the current pace. Break expenses into categories: software, contractors, course production, ads, and everything else.

Take my actual Stripe and Plaid baseline and build three scenarios: (1) I run one cohort per quarter at current pricing, (2) I run two cohorts per quarter, (3) I raise my flagship program from $1,200 to $1,700 and keep one cohort per quarter. Show me runway and monthly burn for each.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect your Stripe account — Starch syncs your charges, invoices, subscriptions, and payouts on a schedule so revenue is always current, including the bump from a cohort launch or the dip during an off-month.

2 Connect your bank account through Plaid — Starch pulls categorized transactions and balances daily, which means your actual cash position is always reflected, not last Tuesday's guess.

3 Open the Runway Analysis app from the Starch App Store. It's pre-built for exactly this — net burn, months of cash, and expense breakdown — so you don't describe the whole thing from scratch.

4 Tell Starch how to categorize your education-business expenses: software (Kajabi, Zoom, ConvertKit, Circle), contractors (video editor, VA, course designer), paid ads, and course production. Starch maps your Plaid transaction descriptions to those buckets.

5 Review the 6-month burn trend. If your data shows a $40k launch month followed by three $7k months, the dashboard calculates a rolling average that reflects your actual business rhythm — not a single outlier month.

6 Check the 24-month forward projection at your current pace. This is your baseline answer to 'when do I need to raise prices, add a cohort, or cut spend?'

7 Open the Scenario Analysis app. Your Stripe and Plaid baseline carries over automatically — you're not re-entering numbers.

8 Build your first scenario: what does runway look like if you add a second cohort this quarter? Describe the revenue assumption ('add $18,000 in Stripe revenue in Q2') and let Starch model it against your current burn.

9 Build your second scenario: what if you raise your flagship from $1,200 to $1,700 per seat and keep the same cohort cadence? Model the revenue lift against your current cost structure.

10 Build your third scenario: what if you hire a part-time ops contractor at $2,500/month starting in month 3? See exactly how many months that hire costs you in runway.

11 Compare all three side by side. Starch shows runway, monthly net burn, and break-even month under each set of assumptions — the output you'd normally ask a finance consultant to produce.

12 Set a weekly check-in: Starch updates both apps daily, so every Monday you open Runway Analysis and confirm nothing has shifted materially before the week's decisions.

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

April 2026 — post-spring cohort close

Sample numbers from a real run

Stripe revenue (March cohort, 24 seats × $1,200)	28,800
Stripe revenue (evergreen course sales, March)	4,200
Plaid: Kajabi subscription	-149
Plaid: Zoom + ConvertKit + Circle	-198
Plaid: video editor contractor (2 modules)	-3,200
Plaid: Meta ads (spring launch campaign)	-5,400
Plaid: course production (guest speaker fees)	-1,200
Plaid: misc software and tools	-620
Bank balance (Plaid, April 1)	61,400

After the spring cohort closes, Starch shows $61,400 in cash and a net burn that looks variable at first — March was a $23,033 net-positive month because of the cohort launch, but February was a $5,800 net-negative month in the off-cycle. The Runway Analysis dashboard calculates your true rolling burn at roughly $3,100/month when cohort revenue is smoothed across the quarter, giving you 19.8 months of runway at current pace. Without Starch, you'd have averaged March (good) and February (bad) and landed on a number that didn't mean anything. The Scenario Analysis shows: if you run two cohorts per quarter instead of one — adding roughly $28,800 in Stripe revenue every three months — your projected runway extends past 36 months and you reach break-even on a $2,500/month ops hire within 4 months. You decide to post the ops contractor role in May.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Months of runway at current rolling burn (updated daily, not after your bookkeeper closes the month)

Net burn per month — smoothed across cohort launch months and off-months so one big launch doesn't distort the number

Revenue per cohort vs. break-even seat count (how many seats do you need to sell before the cohort covers its production and ad spend)

Cost per enrolled student — total Plaid expenses attributable to a cohort divided by seats filled

Runway delta per pricing or cadence scenario — how many months does a second cohort or a $500 price increase add?

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Sheets with manual Stripe and bank exports

Free and familiar, but you rebuild the model every quarter, the burn calculation breaks when you have a launch month outlier, and it goes stale the day after you update it.

QuickBooks + your accountant's quarterly summary

Accurate for tax and compliance purposes, but a quarterly cadence is too slow when you're deciding whether to hire in April; also requires your accountant's time for every what-if scenario.

Pilot or Bench (bookkeeping services)

Handles categorization and closes your books cleanly, but doesn't give you a self-serve runway dashboard or scenario modeling — you still email someone to ask 'what if I add a cohort.'

Kajabi or Teachable's built-in revenue reporting

Shows gross course revenue but has no visibility into your actual bank balance, contractor spend, or ad costs — so you can see sales but not whether you're profitable or how long cash lasts.

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 is lumpy — I make $30k during a cohort launch and almost nothing two months later. Won't that make the runway number useless?

This is exactly the problem Runway Analysis is built to handle. It calculates a rolling net burn across the last 6 months rather than using a single month as the baseline, so a big launch month and a quiet off-month both factor into a realistic average. You'll see the month-by-month trend and the smoothed number side by side.

I run payments through both Stripe (for courses) and sometimes PayPal or Venmo for coaching clients. Does Starch see all of it?

Starch syncs your Stripe data directly on a schedule. For payments that hit your bank account from PayPal, Venmo, or anywhere else, Plaid picks those up as bank transactions — so the cash balance and the expense categories are complete. The Stripe-specific data (invoices, subscriptions, cohort charges) is richer than what appears in the bank feed, so you get both views.

I don't use QuickBooks — I just have a business checking account and Stripe. Is that enough to run this?

Yes. Runway Analysis is designed to run on just Plaid and Stripe, which covers most solo education founders. QuickBooks is optional — it adds richer entity-level data (vendor bills, journal entries) if you're already using it, but it's not required.

Can Starch pull data from Kajabi or Teachable to show student revenue alongside my bank data?

If your Kajabi or Teachable revenue routes through Stripe, Starch captures it via the Stripe sync — that's the most common setup. If you use Kajabi's native payments or another processor, Starch can reach Kajabi through browser automation (no API required) to pull revenue data, or you can connect it from Starch's integration catalog of 3,000+ apps.

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

Not yet — Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. That's worth knowing before you connect financial data. Plaid uses read-only bank access and doesn't store your banking credentials; Stripe's connection is OAuth-based. But if SOC 2 certification is a hard requirement for your setup, that's an honest reason to wait.

My scenario assumptions change every week as enrollment numbers come in. Do I have to rebuild the model each time?

No. Scenario Analysis keeps your Stripe and Plaid baseline current automatically because both data sources sync on a schedule. You adjust only the assumptions you want to change — cohort size, price, a new hire's monthly cost — and the model recalculates. You're not re-entering actuals; you're just tweaking the variables.