Finance & FP&A

How to model financial scenarios and sensitivities as Asset Management Founders

Finance & FP&AFor Asset Management Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

You're running scenario models in Excel or Google Sheets because Addepar costs $50k+ and assumes you have an analyst to maintain it. Every time a portfolio company misses its revenue target or you're deciding whether to call capital for a new position, you rebuild the same spreadsheet from scratch — manually pulling bank transactions from Plaid or your accounting system, re-entering Stripe revenue if any fund vehicles have management fee income, and wrestling with broken cell references. LP due diligence questions like 'what's your fund's net burn under a 2-year deployment scenario?' turn into a half-day fire drill. You need scenario modeling that uses your actual numbers, not placeholder assumptions from a template you downloaded in 2022.

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Finance & FP&AFor Asset Management Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live baseline scenario tied to your real Stripe management fee revenue and Plaid bank transactions — not a spreadsheet with numbers you typed in last quarter

Side-by-side scenario comparisons (slow deployment, accelerated hiring, delayed fund close) showing runway and burn under each assumption so you can answer LP questions on the spot

A recurring financial model that updates as your actuals change, so you're not rebuilding from scratch every time your capital deployment pace shifts

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

Scenario Analysis Runway Analysis Budgeting

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Stripe data and Plaid bank transaction data on a schedule — management fee deposits, fund expense debits, and categorized transactions flow into Starch automatically and power the baseline for all three apps. No manual exports or CSV uploads required. If you use QuickBooks for fund-level accounting, Starch syncs your QuickBooks entities (invoices, bills, journal entries) on a schedule as well and can layer that into the model.

Prompts to copy

Build me a scenario analysis that uses my Stripe management fee revenue and Plaid operating account transactions as the baseline, then lets me model three scenarios: (1) current pace, (2) hiring two more team members in Q3, and (3) a 12-month fund close delay that cuts management fee income by 40%. Show runway, monthly burn, and break-even date for each.

Show me my last 6 months of actual burn by category — management fees paid out, fund admin costs, legal, travel — and project forward 24 months at current pace so I have a baseline before I start adjusting scenarios.

Set up a quarterly budget for my fund's operating expenses using my historical Plaid spending as the baseline, and flag when any category goes more than 15% over.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Stripe to Starch — management fee invoices and deposits sync automatically on a schedule so your revenue baseline reflects what's actually been collected, not what's been committed.

2 Connect Plaid to your fund's operating bank accounts — Starch syncs categorized transactions daily, giving you a real expense baseline instead of estimates.

3 If you use QuickBooks for fund accounting, connect it — Starch syncs bills, invoices, and journal entries on a schedule; this is especially useful if your fund admin team reconciles there.

4 Open the Runway Analysis app from the Starch App Store and confirm the baseline looks right — verify that management fee revenue is mapped correctly and that the expense categories match how you think about operating costs (fund admin, legal, personnel, travel).

5 Open the Scenario Analysis app and describe your first scenario in plain language — tell Starch what assumption you want to change (e.g., revenue drops 40% if the fund close slips, or headcount adds $180k/year in salary) and let it build the model.

6 Add at least two more scenarios — a base case at current pace and an accelerated-deployment scenario where you're drawing on reserves to move faster. Starch keeps them side-by-side so you can compare runway and burn across all three at once.

7 Check the break-even and runway outputs against what you'd expect — Starch uses real net burn calculated from your actual data, not a single-month average, so the numbers should be more accurate than what you've been working with in Excel.

8 Use the Budgeting app to set quarterly operating expense targets by category, using your Plaid historical spend as the suggested allocation baseline — this gives you a live variance tracker so you can see mid-quarter if you're on pace or burning faster than planned.

9 When an LP asks a scenario question during a call — 'what happens to your runway if Fund II takes 18 months to close instead of 12?' — pull up the scenario panel and adjust the assumption live rather than promising to follow up with a model.

10 Set a monthly prompt or scheduled check-in to review whether your actual Stripe and Plaid data has drifted from your scenario assumptions — if management fees came in light, update the revenue input and let Starch recalculate runway across all scenarios.

11 Before your next LP quarterly update, use the scenario outputs as the financial narrative input — the break-even dates and burn-by-category breakdowns are the numbers your LPs are actually asking about.

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 Fund I operating review — deployment scenario modeling

Sample numbers from a real run

Management fee revenue (2% on $12M deployed)	240,000
Fund admin & compliance (Carta, legal retainer)	72,000
Personnel (2 FTEs + fractional CFO)	168,000
Travel & LP relations	24,000
Software & data (all tools)	18,000
Net operating burn (annual)	-42,000

At the start of Q2 2026, your fund has deployed $12M of a $20M first close, collecting $240k/year in management fees against $282k in operating costs — a $42k annual burn on the management company. The question on the table: do you hire a junior analyst at $120k all-in before the final close, or wait? In Scenario A (current pace, no hire), Starch calculates 38 months of runway on the management company at current burn. In Scenario B (hire the analyst now), burn rises to $162k/year and runway compresses to 19 months — which is fine if Fund I's final close happens in Q4 as planned, but tight if it slips to mid-2027. In Scenario C (final close slips 12 months and management fees stay flat on $12M deployed rather than growing to $20M), Starch shows you'd need to either cut costs by $80k or dip into carry reserves to cover the gap. You walk into your next LP advisory committee call with all three scenarios loaded, runway numbers based on actual Plaid transactions and Stripe fee deposits — not a spreadsheet you updated three weeks ago.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Management company runway in months under each deployment scenario

Net burn rate on the management company (actual, not estimate) — updated from Plaid transactions

Variance between budgeted and actual fund operating expenses by category (quarterly)

Break-even management fee AUM — the deployment threshold at which management fees cover full operating costs

Months of runway delta between base case and worst-case scenario (fund close delay or fee revenue shortfall)

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Excel or Google Sheets

Free and flexible, but every scenario update requires manual data entry from your bank and Stripe — the model is only as current as the last time you updated it, which in practice means it's always stale when you need it.

Addepar or Juniper Square

Purpose-built for fund accounting and LP reporting, but priced for established managers with dedicated ops staff — typically $50k+ per year with onboarding timelines measured in months, not hours.

Causal or Mosaic

Strong scenario modeling UIs, but you're still connecting data sources manually and the tools don't bundle the CRM, email triage, and scheduling tools you also need — so you're paying for another standalone product.

QuickBooks + a fractional CFO building models in Excel

Works, but the model lives with the CFO — every scenario question means a turnaround cycle rather than pulling up a live answer during an LP call.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — scenario planning, runway analysis, quarterly budgeting 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

Does Starch work if my fund's financials live in QuickBooks but my operating account is at a bank not supported by Plaid?

Plaid covers the vast majority of US banks and credit unions. If your specific bank isn't in Plaid's network, Starch can automate data collection through your browser — no API needed — as long as you can log into your bank's web portal. The QuickBooks sync (bills, invoices, journal entries) works independently of Plaid and gives you entity-level accounting data on a schedule.

Can Starch model scenarios for both the management company and the fund vehicle itself, or just the management company?

The Scenario Analysis app is designed around cash flows you can connect — management fee revenue from Stripe, operating expenses from Plaid bank feeds, and accounting entities from QuickBooks or NetSuite. Fund vehicle modeling (NAV, IRR, distributions) requires data that typically lives in your fund admin's system and isn't currently part of what Starch syncs. Starch is best suited to management company operations today.

Is my financial data stored in Starch, and is that safe for LP-sensitive information?

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today — that's worth knowing before you connect your most sensitive data. Scheduled-sync data (Stripe, Plaid, QuickBooks) is stored in Starch's database to power live dashboards and scenario models. If your fund's compliance posture requires SOC 2 certification in your tools, that's a real constraint to weigh.

What happens to my scenario models when my actual numbers change — do I have to rebuild them?

No. Because the baseline is tied to your live Stripe and Plaid data syncing on a schedule, the numbers in your scenarios update automatically as actuals come in. You only need to revisit the assumption inputs (like headcount changes or deployment pace) when your plans change — not every time your bank statement updates.

The QuickBooks P&L and Transaction List reports would be useful for this — can Starch pull those?

QuickBooks report views (P&L, Transaction List, Vendor Expenses) are temporarily disabled pending a connector fix. Entity-level data — invoices, bills, journal entries, vendors, payments — syncs normally on a schedule and is what powers the Starch scenario baseline. For fund-level financial narratives, the entity data is usually sufficient; the formatted report views will be back once the upstream fix is in.

Can I share scenario outputs directly with my LPs or show them during a board call?

You can pull up your scenario comparison view during any call — it's a live dashboard, not a static file. Starch doesn't currently generate formatted PDF reports for LP delivery, so if you need a polished deck you'd export the numbers and drop them into your existing LP reporting template. The Investor Reporting app handles the LP-facing output side; Scenario Analysis is the modeling layer underneath it.