Finance & FP&A

How to forecast runway and months of cash as Small Finance Teams

Finance & FP&AFor Small Finance Teams2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Every Friday you rebuild the 13-week cash forecast in the same Google Sheet you've been patching for two years. You pull Stripe payouts manually, export a QuickBooks transaction register, reconcile it against the Plaid feed to catch anything that slipped through, and pray nothing changed in NetSuite since Tuesday. By the time the model is 'current,' it's Monday and the CFO is already asking whether you can close the hire in Q3. You're a three-person team — one doing close, one chasing AP, one fielding ad-hoc questions — and none of you have four hours on Friday to do this again. The sheet isn't wrong; it's just never finished.

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Finance & FP&AFor Small Finance Teams2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live burn rate and runway dashboard that pulls directly from Stripe, Plaid, QuickBooks, and NetSuite on a schedule — so the number is current every morning, not just on Fridays after you've manually refreshed it

A scenario model where you change one assumption — headcount growth, a delayed fundraise, a 15% revenue miss — and immediately see how runway shifts, without rebuilding the base case from scratch

A repeatable Q-end reporting surface that replaces the three-day board deck assembly process with a dashboard your CFO can pull themselves between now and the next close

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 Stripe, Plaid, QuickBooks, and NetSuite data on a schedule — transactions, invoices, balances, and payroll data refresh automatically and live in Starch's database. No manual exports, no CSV uploads. The Runway Analysis and Scenario Analysis apps are pre-built starters that wire to these sources out of the box; you customize from there or describe something new and Starch builds it.

Prompts to copy

Connect my Stripe and Plaid accounts and build a runway dashboard showing net burn by month for the last 6 months, projected forward 24 months at current pace, with expense categories broken out so I can see where burn is accelerating

Build a scenario model on top of my Runway Analysis baseline — I want to compare three cases: current plan, 20% revenue miss with no cost cuts, and a hiring freeze starting July 1. Show me runway end date and monthly burn for each case side by side

Add an AR aging summary to my runway dashboard pulling from QuickBooks — show me invoices 30, 60, and 90 days overdue and flag anything over $50k so I can chase it before the board meeting

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Stripe and Plaid in Starch — both sync on a schedule, so revenue and bank transactions refresh automatically. This is your baseline for actual cash movement, not the ledger-lagged version in QuickBooks.

2 Connect QuickBooks (or NetSuite if that's your system of record) — Starch syncs invoices, bills, vendors, payments, and journal entries on a schedule. Entity-level data syncs normally; note that QuickBooks P&L and Transaction List report views are temporarily disabled, so you'll work from entity data directly.

3 Open the Runway Analysis starter app from the Starch App Store. It wires Stripe revenue and Plaid expense data into a live burn and runway model with 6-month history and 24-month projections — use it as-is or describe changes you want and Starch rebuilds it.

4 Add your QuickBooks AP and AR data to the dashboard by describing it in plain language — something like 'add a section showing outstanding invoices by age bucket, pulled from QuickBooks, refreshed daily.'

5 Open the Scenario Analysis starter app and connect it to the same Stripe and Plaid baseline. Your current run-rate is the default scenario; you don't rebuild the base case, you adjust only the assumptions you want to stress-test.

6 Define your two or three scenarios — for example: current plan, a hiring freeze starting a specific month, and a 20% revenue miss with no offsetting cost action. Describe each one to Starch and it builds the model.

7 Pin your runway end date and monthly net burn as headline KPIs on the dashboard so the CFO sees the same number you're looking at — no more 'which version of the sheet is current?' emails.

8 Set the dashboard to refresh on your preferred cadence — daily for cash balances and burn, weekly for the scenario comparison — so Friday's forecast prep is a review, not a rebuild.

9 Before each board meeting, describe the investor-facing summary you want — 'show me a one-page view of cash balance, months of runway, revenue vs. prior quarter, and the hiring plan scenario' — and Starch generates a surface you can share directly instead of pasting numbers into slides.

10 When the CFO asks a one-off question mid-close ('what's gross margin by product line this quarter?'), describe the view in Starch and it pulls from your live-synced Stripe and QuickBooks data — no interrupting whoever is doing the close to run a custom report.

11 At quarter-end, compare actuals against each scenario to see which assumptions held. Update your scenario inputs for the next planning cycle without rebuilding the model structure.

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

Q2 2026 fundraise timing decision — June close week

Sample numbers from a real run

Cash (Plaid — operating account)	2,840,000
Stripe MRR (May actuals)	187,000
Monthly burn — May actuals (Plaid net)	312,000
Net burn (burn minus revenue)	125,000
AR overdue 60+ days (QuickBooks)	94,000
Projected runway at current burn (months)	22.7
Projected runway — hiring freeze scenario (months)	31.4
Projected runway — 20% revenue miss scenario (months)	14.1

It's June 9th, close week, and the CEO wants to know whether you should start a Series B process now or wait until Q4. Your Runway Analysis dashboard shows $2.84M in cash, $312k gross burn, $187k in Stripe revenue, and $125k net burn in May — 22.7 months of runway at the current pace. That's comfortable on paper, but your CFO wants to see the downside. You open the Scenario Analysis app and pull up the three cases you built last week. The 20% revenue miss scenario — no cost cuts, same headcount plan — drops runway to 14.1 months. The hiring freeze scenario extends it to 31.4. You also notice $94k in AR sitting 60+ days overdue in QuickBooks that isn't reflected in the Stripe inflow yet; you flag it in the dashboard and add a chase task. The output: the team decides to start the Series B process in September, not Q4, because the downside scenario shows a tighter cushion than the headline number suggested. That decision took 20 minutes in Starch. The version before Starch took most of Thursday.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Net burn (gross burn minus revenue) — monthly actuals vs. prior 6-month trend

Months of runway — updated daily from live Plaid balances and Stripe revenue

AR aging — invoices 30/60/90 days overdue as a percentage of MRR

Scenario delta — runway difference between base case and worst-case downside

Forecast vs. actual variance — monthly burn actuals vs. the prior Friday's projection

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Sheets (manual 13-week cash model)

Free and infinitely flexible, but someone has to rebuild it every Friday — it reflects last week's data, not today's, and breaks when headcount or revenue assumptions change mid-cycle

NetSuite or QuickBooks native reporting

Accurate ledger views, but not built for forward cash projections or scenario comparisons — you get the historical P&L, not the 'when do we run out of money if Q3 misses?' answer

Mosaic, Cube, or Drivetrain (FP&A platforms)

Purpose-built for finance teams and powerful at scale, but priced for companies with a dedicated FP&A headcount and usually require a multi-week implementation — a three-person team supporting 200 people often can't justify the seat cost or the setup time

Excel + Stripe and QuickBooks exports

Most finance teams know Excel cold, but the data pipeline is entirely manual — you're always one missed export or copy-paste error away from a board meeting with the wrong number on slide 4

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

We use NetSuite as our ERP, not QuickBooks. Does Starch sync from NetSuite the same way?

Yes. Starch syncs your NetSuite data on a schedule — invoices, expenses, journal entries, balance sheets, and income statements. The Runway Analysis and Scenario Analysis apps are built to work with NetSuite data the same way they work with QuickBooks. You connect NetSuite in Starch, describe the surface you want, and it builds from your actual NetSuite entities.

The QuickBooks P&L report is something we rely on. Can Starch pull that?

Honestly: not right now. QuickBooks P&L and Transaction List report views are temporarily disabled while an upstream connector issue gets fixed. Entity-level data — invoices, bills, vendors, payments, journal entries — syncs normally, and you can build a P&L-equivalent surface from those entities in Starch. It's a real limit worth knowing about before you start, and the report view support is on the roadmap.

We use Ramp and Bill.com for AP. Can Starch connect to those?

Starch connects to 3,000+ apps through its integration catalog, plus any website through browser automation. Ramp and Bill.com are reachable — connect them from the integration catalog and the agent queries them live when your app or dashboard needs the data. If you want transactions pulled into your burn model alongside Plaid, describe it to Starch and it builds the integration into your existing dashboard.

Is this actually updating daily, or do I still have to manually trigger a refresh?

For the scheduled-sync providers — Stripe, Plaid, QuickBooks, NetSuite — data refreshes on a schedule automatically. You set the cadence (daily is typical for cash data) and Starch handles the sync. You don't trigger it manually. The dashboard reflects what came in on the most recent sync, which is noted on the surface so you always know the data freshness.

We're not SOC 2 certified as a company yet. Is Starch?

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your internal security policy or a data-sharing agreement with investors requires SOC 2 Type II on all vendors handling financial data, that's a real consideration. It's on the roadmap. Worth asking your security team what the actual requirement is — some companies are fine with a vendor security review in the interim.

Our CFO wants to edit scenarios directly, not just view them. Can non-technical users adjust assumptions?

Yes, that's the core use case. You describe the scenario — 'show me what happens if we hire 8 engineers in Q3 instead of 5' — and Starch adjusts the model. Your CFO doesn't need to touch a formula. If you want a UI where they can drag a hiring slider or type a number into a field without describing it in natural language, you can describe that interface to Starch and it builds it as a custom app surface on top of the same underlying data.