Finance & FP&A

How to forecast runway and months of cash as Small Investor Relations Teams

Finance & FP&AFor Small Investor Relations Teams2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Your GP asks for updated runway on a Monday morning call and you're still waiting for your bookkeeper to close last month in QuickBooks. You have Plaid connected to the fund's operating account, Stripe pulling management fees, and NetSuite sitting somewhere in the back-office stack — but none of it talks to each other in a surface you can actually hand to the GP or drop into an LP letter. You're maintaining a runway tab in a shared Google Sheet that someone updates manually every quarter, fighting stale numbers every time a capital call lands or a fee invoice slips. Two people can't run a quarterly reporting cycle and a live cash forecast at the same time.

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Finance & FP&AFor Small Investor Relations Teams2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live burn and runway dashboard that pulls fund operating expenses from Plaid and management fee revenue from Stripe on a daily schedule — no manual refresh, no waiting on the bookkeeper

A side-by-side scenario model showing what happens to runway if LP commitments slow, management fees compress, or you front-load a new hire before the next close

A natural-language report surface you can export or paste directly into your GP's weekly update or an LP letter, with the numbers already current

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 transaction and balance data on a schedule (categorized expenses, account balances) and syncs your Stripe data on a schedule (management fee charges, invoices, payouts). Both data sets live in Starch and refresh daily without any manual upload. QuickBooks or NetSuite entity-level data — invoices, bills, vendors, journal entries — can be added via Starch's direct connections to either system. Any LP portal, DocSend data room, or fund admin web interface Starch can't reach via a direct connection is automatable through your browser — no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Connect my Plaid bank feeds and Stripe management fee account. Build me a runway dashboard showing net burn by month for the last 6 months, projected cash runway in months, and a breakdown of operating expenses by category — fund admin, salary, legal, travel, software. Update it every morning.

Using my Plaid and Stripe baseline, build three scenarios: (1) current pace, (2) one additional IR headcount added in Q3 and management fees flat, (3) management fees down 15% if a portfolio company misses its fee payment. Show me runway, monthly burn, and break-even date for each.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect your fund's operating bank account through Plaid. Starch syncs categorized transactions and balances on a daily schedule — this becomes the expense side of your burn calculation.

2 Connect Stripe so Starch syncs management fee charges, invoices, and payouts on a schedule. This is your recurring revenue line, and it updates automatically when a fee invoice clears or a new billing period opens.

3 Install the Runway Analysis app from the Starch App Store. Out of the box it shows net burn, months of cash remaining, and a 6-month expense trend pulling from your Plaid and Stripe data.

4 Customize the expense category breakdown to match how your fund actually classifies costs — fund administration, audit and legal, GP salary draws, IR software subscriptions, travel for LP meetings. Describe the categories in plain English; Starch remaps them.

5 If QuickBooks is your source of truth for accrued expenses or vendor payables, connect it. Starch syncs QuickBooks invoices, bills, vendors, and payments so your burn number reflects committed spend, not just cash out the door.

6 Install the Scenario Analysis app. Set the Plaid/Stripe baseline as Scenario 1 (current pace). Then describe Scenario 2 and 3 to Starch in natural language — for example, 'Add a $120k annual IR coordinator salary starting July 1' or 'Reduce management fee revenue by 15% starting Q4.'

7 Add a commitment pacing line to your scenario model by telling Starch: 'Show me how runway changes if our next LP close slips from Q3 to Q4 and we draw an extra $200k in bridge costs.' Starch adjusts the forward projection without you touching a formula.

8 Set up a weekly automation: every Monday at 7 a.m., pull the current runway figure, net burn for the prior week, and any scenario that has crossed below 12 months of cash, and post a summary to Slack. Describe it to Starch; it handles the scheduling.

9 When your GP or a managing partner asks for a quick update before an LP call, open the Runway Analysis dashboard — it's already current as of that morning. Copy the narrative summary Starch generates and drop it into your LP letter draft or the board deck.

10 If your fund admin portal (Juniper Square, Intralinks, or a similar web-based system) needs data extracted or a capital account statement pulled, Starch automates that through your browser — no API required. Wire it into your quarterly close workflow so the numbers flow into your dashboard without a manual download.

11 Review the scenario outputs quarterly alongside your GP. Use the side-by-side view from Scenario Analysis to anchor the fundraising timing conversation: 'At current pace we have 14 months. If we hire ahead of plan, that drops to 9. That's the decision.' No spreadsheet to rebuild.

12 When limits matter: Starch is not a fund administrator and doesn't replace your audit-grade financials. QuickBooks report views (P&L, Transaction List) are temporarily unavailable — entity-level data syncs normally, so line-item accuracy is intact but formatted report pulls need to come from QuickBooks directly until that's resolved.

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 LP Update Prep — June 30 Close

Sample numbers from a real run

Plaid — Operating Account Balance	1,840,000
Stripe — Management Fees (Q2 Collected)	312,000
Plaid — Fund Admin & Audit Expenses (Q2)	87,000
Plaid — Salary & Contractor Draw (Q2)	142,000
Plaid — Travel & LP Meeting Costs (Q2)	18,500
Plaid — Software & IR Tools (Q2)	11,200
Net Burn (Q2 Monthly Average)	-15,133
Projected Runway at Current Pace	14

Going into the June 30 LP update, your Runway Analysis dashboard showed $1.84M in the operating account as of that morning, against a Q2 average net burn of $15,133 per month — 14 months of runway at current pace. Management fee collections from Stripe ran $312k for the quarter, slightly above the $300k budget because one portfolio company's fee invoice cleared early. The Plaid expense breakdown showed fund admin and audit at $87k (in line), but travel and LP meeting costs came in at $18.5k against a $12k quarterly budget — the GP had made an unplanned trip to a portfolio board meeting. You opened Scenario Analysis, added a note: 'Add $18k quarterly to travel line starting Q3, keep all else flat.' Runway dropped from 14 months to 12.7. That became the anchor for a five-minute conversation with the GP about whether to delay hiring the IR coordinator until after the next LP close. You pasted the 14-month figure and the scenario comparison into the LP letter draft in under two minutes, with no spreadsheet involved.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Months of cash runway (updated daily, not at quarter close)

Net monthly burn — actual cash out minus management fee collections

Management fee collection rate — invoiced vs. collected within 30 days

Expense variance by category (fund admin, salary, travel, legal) vs. annual budget

Runway delta across scenarios — how many months are lost per major hiring or fee-compression decision

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Sheets + manual Plaid/QuickBooks export

Free and flexible, but someone on your two-person team has to update it manually after every close cycle; the number your GP sees on Monday is always at least two weeks old.

Juniper Square or Addepar

Purpose-built for fund reporting and LP allocations, but $50k+ per year, requires a dedicated IR-ops analyst to operate, and doesn't give you a live burn dashboard for the fund's own operating expenses.

Jirav or Mosaic (FP&A software)

Strong scenario modeling for operating companies, but built for CFO teams with a finance hire; setup takes months and assumes you're modeling a P&L, not a fund's management company cash position.

QuickBooks reporting views

Your bookkeeper already lives here, but formatted P&L and Transaction List report views are temporarily unavailable in Starch's QuickBooks connection — entity-level data (invoices, bills, vendors) syncs fine, so the workaround is pulling line items rather than pre-built reports until that's resolved.

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

Is Starch pulling from our actual bank account or from QuickBooks?

Both, if you connect both. Starch syncs your Plaid bank feed on a schedule for real-time cash positions and categorized transactions. It also syncs QuickBooks entity-level data — invoices, bills, vendors, payments, journal entries — separately. You can tell Starch which source to use for each line in your dashboard, or show both side-by-side to catch timing differences between accrued and cash basis.

Can Starch pull data from our fund admin portal or LP data room?

If it's a web-based portal your team can log into and navigate — Juniper Square, Intralinks, DocSend, or similar — Starch can automate it through your browser. No API or formal integration needed. You describe the workflow (log in, navigate to the capital account summary, extract the commitment and drawdown figures) and Starch handles it.

What if a management fee invoice hasn't cleared yet — will the runway number be wrong?

Starch syncs Stripe on a schedule, so the runway figure reflects fees that have actually been collected. If you want to show projected collections — invoices issued but not yet paid — connect Stripe and tell Starch to include outstanding invoice amounts as expected inflows in the forward projection. The dashboard can show both: confirmed cash and committed-but-not-yet-received.

We use NetSuite, not QuickBooks. Does that work?

Yes. Starch connects directly to NetSuite and syncs invoices, expenses, journal entries, balance sheets, and income statements on a schedule. The Investor Reporting app in the App Store uses NetSuite as a primary source. You can build your runway dashboard on top of NetSuite data the same way you would with QuickBooks.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We have LPs who ask about data security.

Not yet. Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. If your LPs or compliance team requires SOC 2 certification before connecting fund financial data, that's a real constraint to know upfront. It's on the roadmap; check the current status before making a commitment decision.

Can I give the GP read-only access to the dashboard without also giving them access to the underlying bank connections?

Yes. You control what surfaces you share. The GP can see the runway dashboard and scenario outputs you build without having access to the raw Plaid or Stripe connection credentials or the underlying transaction data unless you explicitly include it.