Finance & FP&A

How to model financial scenarios and sensitivities as Professional Services Founders

Finance & FP&AFor Professional Services Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You're running a 12-person consultancy and your financial model lives in a Google Sheet that one of your senior consultants updates on the last Friday of every month — if they're not on a client deadline. Scenario planning means duplicating that sheet, adjusting a few revenue assumptions by hand, and hoping nobody edits the wrong tab. When a big retainer renewal is uncertain, or you're thinking about adding two more consultants in Q3, you have no fast way to see what that does to cash. Stripe tells you what invoiced; Plaid tells you what moved; QuickBooks tells you what categorized — but none of them talk to each other in a model you can actually pull up before a decision.

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Finance & FP&AFor Professional Services Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live baseline model pulling actual revenue from Stripe invoices and real expenses from Plaid bank feeds — no manual uploads, updated daily, so your baseline is never stale

Side-by-side scenarios you can spin up in minutes: what if that anchor retainer doesn't renew, what if you hire two senior consultants in Q3, what if you raise rates 15% on new engagements

A runway and burn-rate view scoped to your consultancy's actual expense structure — contractor costs, software subscriptions, office, travel — so you see exactly how many months of cash you have under each scenario

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 on a schedule (charges, invoices, payouts) and your Plaid data on a schedule (transactions, balances, categorized expenses). QuickBooks entity-level data — bills, invoices, payments, vendors — also syncs on a schedule if connected. HubSpot deal data is queried live from Starch's integration catalog when you want pipeline-weighted revenue scenarios. Google Sheets is queried live from Starch's integration catalog if you have legacy model data to fold in.

Prompts to copy

Build me a scenario model for my 12-person consultancy. Connect my Stripe account for revenue and Plaid for expenses. My baseline is current revenue and burn. I want three scenarios: (1) anchor retainer worth $18k/month doesn't renew in July, (2) I hire two senior consultants at $120k each starting Q3, (3) both happen at once. Show runway, monthly burn, and break-even for each.

Build me a runway dashboard that shows net burn calculated from Plaid transactions and Stripe payouts, with a 24-month cash projection and expense breakdown by category — contractor fees, SaaS, payroll, travel, and office.

Build me a quarterly budget tracker for the consultancy. Pull historical spending from Plaid to suggest category allocations for Q3. Flag any category that's more than 10% over pace by mid-quarter.

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 — Stripe brings in invoice and payout history, Plaid brings in categorized bank transactions. This is your baseline: real revenue, real burn, no manual entry.

2 Open the Scenario Analysis starter app. It uses your connected Stripe and Plaid data to set the baseline automatically — current monthly revenue, current monthly burn, current runway.

3 Type your first scenario in plain language: 'Remove the $18k/month Monarch Consulting retainer starting July 1. Show what that does to runway and break-even.' Starch builds the scenario without you touching a formula.

4 Add the hiring scenario: 'Add two senior consultant salaries at $10k/month each starting September 1, plus $2k/month in associated SaaS and travel costs.' Starch layers that on top of the baseline.

5 Stack both assumptions into a combined worst-case scenario so you can see the double-hit — lost retainer plus new headcount — before you make either decision.

6 Open the Runway Analysis app to cross-check: it calculates net burn from the same Stripe and Plaid data, shows 6-month historical trend, and projects 24 months forward. If the Scenario Analysis says you're fine and Runway Analysis disagrees, you've found a modeling assumption worth questioning.

7 If you use QuickBooks, connect it in Starch. Bill and invoice entity data syncs on a schedule and gives you a cleaner view of accrued revenue vs. cash collected — important for a consultancy where invoices and deposits don't always land in the same month.

8 Pull HubSpot deals from Starch's integration catalog (queried live) and tell Starch: 'Add a pipeline scenario — weight deals in HubSpot by close probability and add expected revenue to my Q3 baseline.' Now your upside scenario is grounded in real pipeline, not a guess.

9 Open the Budgeting app and set Q3 category budgets for contractor fees, SaaS, payroll, travel, and office. Starch suggests allocations from your Plaid transaction history. Adjust the contractor line to reflect your hiring plan from step 4.

10 Set a weekly automation: 'Every Monday, compare last week's Plaid spend against Q3 budget pace by category and Slack me a summary with any category more than 10% over.' Now you're not waiting until month-end to catch overruns.

11 Before the next board call or investor update, tell Starch: 'Generate a one-page scenario summary comparing baseline, retainer-loss, hiring, and combined scenarios — runway, monthly burn, and break-even for each.' Use that as your talking document instead of rebuilding a slide deck.

12 Revisit the model when assumptions change — new retainer signed, rate increase goes live, hire delayed. Type the change in plain language; Starch re-runs the scenarios against updated actuals automatically.

See this running on Starch

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Worked example

Q3 2026 scenario review — pre-hiring decision

Sample numbers from a real run

Monthly recurring revenue (Stripe, 3-retainer average)	68,000
Contractor and subcontractor costs (Plaid)	21,000
Payroll — existing 12 staff (Plaid)	29,000
SaaS tools and software (Plaid)	3,200
Travel and client entertainment (Plaid)	4,100
Office and facilities (Plaid)	2,800
Net burn (baseline)	-8,100
Cash on hand (Plaid balance)	214,000

At baseline — $68k MRR against $60k in monthly costs — the consultancy is burning $8,100/month net and has 26 months of runway. Scenario 1: the Monarch retainer ($18k/month) doesn't renew in July. Revenue drops to $50k, burn jumps to $26,100/month, runway collapses to 8 months. That's a material change that reframes the hiring conversation entirely. Scenario 2: the retainer holds but you bring on two senior consultants in September — $20k/month in new payroll plus $2k in costs. Burn goes to $30,100/month, runway to 7 months. Combined scenario: retainer loss plus hiring — burn hits $48,100/month, runway under 5 months. With these three numbers in front of you before the Q3 planning call, the decision becomes concrete: don't hire until the Monarch renewal is confirmed, or have a signed replacement retainer in hand. That's the kind of clarity a duplicated spreadsheet never gave you on a Monday morning.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Net cash runway in months (updated daily from Plaid + Stripe, not monthly from your bookkeeper)

Utilization-adjusted revenue — billable hours actually invoiced vs. capacity, so scenarios reflect real revenue risk not theoretical MRR

Retainer concentration risk — what percentage of MRR comes from your top 2 clients, and what scenarios look like if either churns

Gross margin by engagement type (retainer vs. project vs. time-and-materials), pulled from Stripe invoice categories and Plaid cost data

Break-even headcount — how many billable consultants you need at your current blended rate to reach cash-flow positive under each scenario

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Sheets (manual model)

Full control over every formula, but the model is stale the moment it's built — updating it before a decision takes a senior consultant's afternoon, not two minutes.

Mosaic or Runway.com

Purpose-built FP&A tools with strong scenario planning, but they're priced and configured for funded startups with a finance hire; a 12-person consultancy will spend more time on onboarding than on modeling.

QuickBooks reports (P&L, cash flow)

Good for actuals reporting and tax prep, but QuickBooks has no forward scenario modeling — it tells you what happened, not what happens next if you make a hire or lose a retainer.

Kantata / Projector / Deltek (PSA tools)

Enterprise PSA platforms do combine utilization, project financials, and forecasting, but they're priced for 200-person firms and take a quarter to implement — not the right tool for a 12-person shop making fast decisions.

Excel with a finance consultant

A good fractional CFO or financial consultant will build you a solid model, but it's a one-time artifact — every time an assumption changes you're either paying for another session or doing it yourself anyway.

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

My revenue comes from a mix of retainers, project fees, and time-and-materials work — can Starch handle that?

Yes. Starch syncs your Stripe data on a schedule — charges, invoices, and payouts — and you can tell it how to categorize them: 'Treat recurring invoices as retainer revenue, one-off invoices over $10k as project fees, everything else as T&M.' The baseline in Scenario Analysis reflects those categories, and you can model scenarios at the retainer level specifically — 'what if retainer revenue drops 30%' — without blending everything into a single revenue line.

Does Starch store my bank and financial data? I'm cautious about that.

Starch connects to Plaid and Stripe with read-only access and syncs your data on a schedule into its database to power the live dashboards and scenarios. Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today — that's worth knowing if you have strict data-handling requirements. If that's a hard constraint, it's worth discussing with your team before connecting bank feeds.

I use QuickBooks for accounting. Can Starch pull from there instead of or in addition to Plaid?

Both. Starch syncs QuickBooks entity-level data on a schedule — bills, invoices, payments, vendors, journal entries. That gives you an accrual view alongside Plaid's cash view, which is actually useful for a consultancy where invoices often land in a different month than the deposit. Note: QuickBooks report views like P&L and Transaction List are temporarily disabled pending a fix, but entity-level data syncs normally.

My pipeline lives in HubSpot. Can I build scenarios that include deals that haven't closed yet?

Yes. Connect HubSpot from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries your deals live when your app runs. Tell Starch: 'Weight open HubSpot deals by close probability and add the expected monthly value to my revenue baseline starting their projected close date.' That gives you a pipeline-weighted upside scenario alongside your baseline and downside cases.

Can I share the scenario output with my accountant or a board member who isn't in Starch?

You can tell Starch to generate a summary of your scenarios — runway, burn, break-even by scenario — formatted for a board update or investor call. Starch builds the output as a surface you can review and export. There's no automated 'share link for external users' today, so you'd copy or export the content yourself, but the generation part takes two minutes instead of a Friday afternoon.

What if I also want to model utilization — if I add staff but don't have the pipeline to fill them, what does that do to margin?

That's a custom scenario Starch can build. Describe it: 'Model a scenario where I hire two senior consultants at $120k/year each but assume they're only 60% billable for the first two quarters at a $175/hour blended rate. Show the revenue and margin impact vs. my current run rate.' Starch builds that model against your actual Stripe revenue and Plaid cost data. Utilization assumptions have to come from you — Starch doesn't automatically pull timesheet data from Harvest or Float unless you connect them from the integration catalog.