Finance & FP&A

How to model financial scenarios and sensitivities as Small Investor Relations Teams

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

Your two-person IR team is fielding LP questions about commitment pacing and J-curve timing while simultaneously trying to build the next quarterly letter, and your 'model' for answering those questions is a spreadsheet that your CFO last touched three weeks ago. You have Stripe for fund subscription revenue, Plaid pulling bank transactions, and QuickBooks sitting in the corner with six months of actuals in it — but none of them talk to each other. Every time a GP asks 'what does our runway look like if we delay the next capital call by 60 days,' you spend two hours rebuilding the same scenario in Excel instead of answering in five minutes.

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

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live scenario modeling surface that pulls actual revenue and cash data from Stripe and Plaid so your baseline is always current — no manual uploads, no waiting for the books to close

Side-by-side scenario comparisons (delay capital call, accelerate deployment, reduce management fee income) that show runway, burn, and break-even under each set of assumptions

A custom sensitivity dashboard scoped to the KPIs your LPs and GP actually ask about — commitment pacing, net burn, months of operating runway — refreshed on a schedule so you're never presenting stale numbers

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

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Stripe data on a schedule (charges, invoices, subscriptions) and syncs your Plaid data on a schedule (categorized transactions, balances). QuickBooks entity data — invoices, bills, payments, vendors, journal entries — also syncs on a schedule and feeds the baseline model. LP portal data from DocSend or Intralinks is pulled through browser automation — no API needed. The Scenario Analysis and Runway Analysis starter apps are the starting point; you extend them with commitment pacing and sensitivity toggles by describing what you need.

Prompts to copy

Build me a scenario analysis that uses our Stripe subscription revenue and Plaid bank transactions as the baseline, then lets me model three scenarios: (1) capital call delayed 60 days, (2) management fee income drops 15%, (3) we deploy capital 20% faster than plan. Show runway, net burn rate, and break-even month for each scenario side by side.

Build me a runway dashboard that shows our real net burn using Plaid expense data and Stripe revenue, with a 24-month forward projection. Add a sensitivity toggle so I can see how runway changes if we grow management fee revenue by 10%, 20%, or shrink it by 10%.

Add a commitment pacing tracker to my scenario model — show total committed capital versus called capital versus invested capital by quarter, with a projection of when we'll hit our deployment target under each scenario.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Stripe, Plaid, and QuickBooks in Starch — all three sync on a schedule so your baseline model always reflects the most recent actuals without any manual export.

2 Start from the Scenario Analysis app in the Starch App Store — it pulls your Stripe revenue and Plaid burn data automatically and gives you a working baseline model in minutes.

3 Open the Runway Analysis app alongside it to get your current net burn, 6-month trend, and 24-month projection anchored to real cash movements — not estimates.

4 Describe the scenario set you need: tell Starch in plain language which levers matter (capital call timing, deployment pace, fee income) and it builds those toggles into your model.

5 Add a commitment pacing view by typing what you want — something like 'show committed vs called vs invested capital by quarter with a deployment projection' — and Starch builds the surface on top of your connected data.

6 Wire in your LP portal data via browser automation: Starch can log into DocSend or Intralinks through your browser and pull commitment and distribution data on a schedule — no API required.

7 Set up a sensitivity table scoped to the three or four questions your LPs actually send: J-curve timing, net IRR under delayed deployment, operating runway if a capital call slips a quarter.

8 Configure the model to refresh automatically — daily for cash and burn, weekly for commitment pacing — so when a GP asks a question in a Monday morning meeting, you're not rebuilding anything.

9 Publish a read-only dashboard view to share with the CFO or GP so they stop editing the master spreadsheet and your version stays clean.

10 When the quarterly letter cycle opens, pull the scenario comparison directly into your LP letter draft — the numbers are already live, you're just writing the narrative around them.

11 Save the scenario configurations so next quarter you're adjusting assumptions, not rebuilding the model from scratch — the structure carries forward.

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

Q1 2026 LP Letter Prep — Capital Call Timing Sensitivity

Sample numbers from a real run

Management fee revenue (Stripe, trailing 3mo)	187,500
Operating expenses (Plaid, trailing 3mo)	142,000
Net burn — baseline	-54,500
Called capital on hand (QuickBooks)	2,100,000
Uncalled LP commitments remaining	8,400,000
Projected runway — baseline (months)	38
Projected runway — 60-day call delay scenario (months)	31
Projected runway — accelerated deployment scenario (months)	24

It's February 2026 and your GP wants to know whether delaying the Q1 capital call by 60 days creates a problem given the current deployment pace. In the old world, you pull the QuickBooks export, find last quarter's Plaid transactions, reconcile the two in Excel, and build three tabs manually — two hours minimum, more if the books aren't closed. With Starch, the Scenario Analysis app already has your $187,500 quarterly management fee revenue from Stripe and your $142,000 operating expense run rate from Plaid synced and loaded. Your baseline shows 38 months of operating runway on current burn. You type: 'Show me what happens to runway if the Q1 capital call slips 60 days and deployment continues at the current pace.' Starch builds the scenario: runway compresses to 31 months, net burn is unchanged, but you flag to the GP that the compression is real and warrants a capital call plan by April. You add a third scenario — accelerated deployment at the GP's target pace — and runway drops to 24 months, which means the Q2 call cannot slip. You share a read-only link to the three-scenario view in the GP meeting. The LP letter narrative writes itself from the numbers already on screen.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Net burn rate (management fee revenue minus operating expenses, monthly)

Operating runway in months under each scenario (baseline, delayed call, accelerated deployment)

Called capital as a percentage of total LP commitments, by quarter

J-curve inflection quarter — when net cash flow turns positive under each scenario

Variance between modeled deployment pace and actual invested capital to date

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Juniper Square or Addepar

Purpose-built for fund reporting and LP portals, but starts at $50k+/year and assumes a dedicated IR-ops analyst to configure and maintain — not sized for a two-person team that needs to ship a model today.

Excel + manual QuickBooks export

Free and flexible, but the model is stale within a week of the books closing, someone is always working off an old version, and building a new scenario from scratch takes hours you don't have during letter season.

Visible.vc or Causal

Good for founder-facing investor updates and financial modeling, but not designed for LP-level commitment tracking or capital call sensitivity analysis specific to fund operations.

Q4 Inc. or Irwin (public company IR)

Strong for shareholder CRM and earnings communications at public companies, but doesn't model financial scenarios or connect to your internal accounting data — separate tool, separate cost, separate workflow.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — scenario planning, runway analysis 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 actually sync QuickBooks, or does it just query it live each time?

Starch syncs QuickBooks entity data on a schedule — invoices, bills, payments, vendors, journal entries are stored in Starch's database and refresh automatically. One honest limit: QuickBooks report views like the P&L summary and Transaction List are temporarily unavailable while an upstream connector issue is being fixed. Entity-level data, which is what most scenario models need, syncs normally.

We use an LP portal like DocSend or Intralinks to share data room materials. Can Starch pull commitment data from those?

Yes, through browser automation. Starch can log into DocSend or Intralinks through your browser and pull the data you'd normally read manually — no API needed. You describe what you want to track and Starch automates the extraction on a schedule.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We have LPs who ask about data security before we connect any accounting data.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. That's worth naming honestly if your LPs ask. It's on the roadmap. For teams where that certification is a hard requirement before connecting QuickBooks or Plaid, it's a real consideration.

We don't use Stripe — our management fees come through wire transfers that show up in QuickBooks. Can the model still work?

Yes. The Scenario Analysis and Runway Analysis apps use Stripe as the default revenue source because it's a scheduled-sync provider, but you can describe your actual revenue structure to Starch and it will build the model around QuickBooks invoice and payment data instead. Tell Starch: 'Use QuickBooks payment receipts as the revenue input instead of Stripe' and it reconfigures the baseline accordingly.

Can we run scenarios on uncalled LP commitments and deployment pacing, or is this just a burn-rate tool?

The starter Scenario Analysis app is built around burn and runway, but you extend it by describing what you need. Tell Starch to add commitment pacing — called versus uncalled versus invested by quarter — and it builds that surface on top of your connected data. The starting point is a template; what you end up with is scoped to your actual fund structure.

Our CFO wants to be able to view the model without being able to edit the assumptions. Is that possible?

Yes. You can publish a read-only view of any Starch dashboard or app and share it via link. Your CFO sees the live numbers without touching the underlying model or the connected data sources.