Finance & FP&A

How to model financial scenarios and sensitivities as Small Finance Teams

Finance & FP&AFor Small Finance Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Your 13-week cash model lives in a Google Sheet that you rebuild every Friday by exporting a CSV from QuickBooks, copy-pasting Stripe payouts, and manually keying in the Plaid balance from your banking portal. Scenario modeling means duplicating the tab, renaming it 'Hire 3 Reps - Aggressive,' and hoping nobody edits the wrong version. When the CFO asks 'what happens to runway if we push the Series B six months?' you spend two hours untangling formula references before you can answer. The model is always slightly stale, scenarios live in 14 different tabs nobody trusts, and you're doing all of this during close week.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Finance & FP&AFor Small Finance Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live baseline model that pulls directly from your QuickBooks or NetSuite actuals and Stripe revenue — no CSV exports, no manual updates

Side-by-side scenario views (hiring plan, price increase, delayed fundraise, slower growth) built on your real numbers, each showing runway, burn rate, and break-even

A Slack or email alert that flags when actual burn deviates materially from any scenario's assumptions, so you catch drift before the board asks

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 QuickBooks data on a schedule (invoices, bills, payments, vendors, journal entries) and your Stripe data on a schedule (charges, subscriptions, payouts). Plaid bank feeds also sync on a schedule for cash balance and categorized transaction data. NetSuite syncs on a schedule if that's your ERP (income statements, balance sheets, journal entries). All four are live in Starch's database — no exports required.

Prompts to copy

Build me a scenario analysis that uses my Stripe MRR and Plaid cash balance as the baseline, then lets me compare three scenarios: current pace, 20% slower revenue growth, and adding 5 headcount in Q3. Show runway in months, monthly net burn, and break-even date for each scenario.

Build me a runway dashboard that shows net burn over the last 6 months from Plaid transactions and Stripe payouts, a 24-month forward projection at current burn, and a category breakdown of where cash is going.

Build me a quarterly budget tracker that compares our QuickBooks actuals against the plan we set in January, broken down by department, and shows me which categories are running more than 10% over pace.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect QuickBooks or NetSuite from the Starch integrations panel — Starch begins syncing invoices, bills, vendors, payments, and journal entries on a schedule within minutes.

2 Connect Stripe — Starch syncs charges, subscriptions, and payouts on a schedule so your revenue baseline is always current.

3 Connect Plaid — Starch syncs your bank transactions and balances on a schedule, giving you the cash layer that QuickBooks alone can't reliably provide during the week.

4 Start with the Runway Analysis app from the App Store — it combines your Stripe revenue and Plaid cash data into a live burn rate dashboard with 6-month history and 24-month projections. You'll have a working answer to 'when do we need to raise?' before you finish your coffee.

5 Open the Scenario Analysis app from the App Store — your connected Stripe and Plaid data populate the baseline automatically. You're not starting from a blank model.

6 Define your scenarios in plain language: type 'Add scenario: we hire 5 people in July at an average fully-loaded cost of $180k, revenue growth stays flat' and Starch adjusts the model.

7 Add the CFO's specific question as a named scenario — 'Series B delayed by 6 months, burn stays constant' — and compare it against current pace and the hiring plan in a single view.

8 Use the Budgeting app to set your departmental plan for the quarter and wire it against QuickBooks actuals, so your scenario assumptions are grounded in where you're actually spending today rather than last quarter's memory.

9 Build a custom alert automation in plain language: 'Every Monday morning, check whether actual net burn from Plaid over the past 4 weeks is more than 8% above the baseline scenario. If so, send me a Slack message with the variance and which expense categories are driving it.'

10 Share a read-only view of the scenario dashboard with your CFO and CEO so they can pull up runway by scenario without pinging you — a direct line to the model, not another Slack thread.

11 Before board prep, tell Starch: 'Summarize how each of our three scenarios has shifted since last quarter's board meeting, with the change in projected runway for each' — use the output as the first draft of your board materials narrative.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

Q2 2026 Headcount Decision — April Close Week

Sample numbers from a real run

Current cash (Plaid)	4,200,000
MRR (Stripe)	310,000
Monthly gross burn (QuickBooks actuals)	510,000
Net burn — baseline	200,000
Net burn — +5 hires scenario	290,000
Runway — baseline (months)	21
Runway — +5 hires scenario (months)	14

It's Tuesday of close week and your CEO wants to know whether you can afford to make five engineering offers before the end of Q2. In the old world you'd duplicate your Friday sheet, key in estimates, and send a reply three hours later. Instead, your Starch Runway Analysis is already live — it pulled Monday's Plaid balance of $4.2M and April Stripe payouts this morning. You open Scenario Analysis and type: 'Add scenario: 5 new hires starting July 1, fully loaded cost $180k each annually, all other assumptions unchanged.' Starch recalculates in seconds. Baseline net burn is $200k/month on $4.2M cash — 21 months of runway. The hiring scenario pushes net burn to $290k/month and drops runway to 14 months. You add a third scenario — 'same 5 hires but MRR grows 15% by Q4 from the new reps' pipeline' — and runway recovers to 17 months. You paste a screenshot into Slack at 9:45am. The CEO makes the decision by noon. Close week continues.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Net burn rate (monthly actuals vs. each scenario's assumption)

Runway in months — updated daily, not monthly

Scenario variance: how much each assumption change moves projected runway

Budget vs. actuals by department (especially headcount and S&M)

MRR growth rate vs. burn growth rate — the ratio that determines whether you're trending toward profitability or away from it

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Sheets (manual model)

You own the model completely and it costs nothing, but it's rebuilt from scratch every Friday and a wrong paste breaks every downstream scenario — the maintenance burden falls entirely on the one person who understands the formula structure.

Mosaic or Jirav

Purpose-built FP&A platforms with strong scenario tooling, but they start at $1,000–$2,000/month, require a multi-week implementation, and are scoped for teams that have a full-time FP&A analyst to manage them — overkill for a three-person team that needs answers this week.

Excel + Power Query

More powerful than Sheets for large models and handles multiple data sources better, but it still requires manual refreshes, file versioning discipline, and someone who knows Power Query well enough to maintain the data connections after they're built.

QuickBooks / NetSuite built-in reports

Your ERP is the system of record for actuals and that's the right call, but it has no scenario modeling, no Stripe or Plaid integration, and no way to show the CFO 'what if we delay the raise' — it tells you what happened, not what could happen.

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

QuickBooks report views like P&L and Transaction List aren't working — is that a problem for scenario modeling?

Honest answer: QuickBooks P&L and Transaction List report views are temporarily disabled while a connector fix is in progress. Entity-level data — invoices, bills, payments, vendors, journal entries — syncs normally. For scenario modeling, that's usually sufficient: your burn comes from bills and payments, your revenue baseline comes from Stripe, and your cash position comes from Plaid. If you specifically need the formatted QuickBooks P&L report, flag it and we'll keep you updated on the fix timeline.

We use NetSuite, not QuickBooks. Does this still work?

Yes. Starch syncs NetSuite on a schedule — invoices, expenses, journal entries, balance sheets, and income statements. The Scenario Analysis and Runway Analysis apps wire to NetSuite the same way they wire to QuickBooks. Connect your NetSuite instance from the integrations panel and the apps use it automatically.

Can Starch model a specific scenario — like 'what if we raise a $10M round in October?'

Yes. Tell Starch in plain language: 'Add scenario: we close a $10M Series A on October 15, burn stays at current pace, no new hires.' Starch adds the cash inflow to the model and recalculates runway and break-even from that point forward. You can stack assumptions — 'and we hire 4 people in Q1 2027' — and it updates the scenario.

Is the data stored in Starch or just live-queried?

QuickBooks, NetSuite, Stripe, and Plaid are all scheduled-sync providers — their data syncs into Starch's database on a schedule and lives there. That means your Runway and Scenario dashboards load instantly from stored data; they're not making an API call to QuickBooks every time someone opens the page. The tradeoff: Starch is not a long-horizon data warehouse. It's built for live operational surfaces, not multi-year archived analytics.

We're three people. Is this going to take weeks to set up?

The connections (QuickBooks or NetSuite, Stripe, Plaid) take a few minutes each — OAuth flows, no engineering work. The Runway Analysis and Scenario Analysis starter apps are pre-built; you're not describing them from scratch. Most teams have a working baseline model the same day they connect their data sources. Custom scenarios and alert automations add maybe an hour after that.

What about Ramp or Bill.com — can Starch pull data from those?

Ramp and Bill.com are reachable from Starch's integration catalog of 3,000+ apps; the agent queries them live when your app runs. They're not scheduled-sync providers, so their data isn't stored in Starch's database between queries. For most scenario modeling purposes your QuickBooks actuals and Plaid transactions cover the same ground — but if you want a specific Ramp spend view in a dashboard, connect it from the integration catalog and describe what you want to see.