Internal Comms & Meetings

How to prepare an all-hands deck as CPG Founders

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor CPG Founders4 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Every quarter you're building an all-hands deck from scratch — copying numbers out of Shopify, pulling distributor sell-through from a retailer portal, screenshotting your Plaid burn chart, and hunting through Slack for the co-packer update from three weeks ago. You do most of this at 10pm the night before because the rest of the day was spent approving labels and chasing a late FBA shipment. By the time you're on slide 6 you've already lost the thread of what story you were trying to tell. The deck ends up being a data dump, not a narrative, and your team walks out without a clear sense of what matters this quarter.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor CPG Founders4 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live all-hands deck that pulls your real financial, sales, and ops numbers into a structured narrative — so you're editing context, not copying cells

A searchable archive of every past all-hands, co-packer update, and team decision, so 'what did we decide about the new SKU launch?' has an answer

An action-item log that comes out of every meeting automatically, assigned to the right person, so follow-through doesn't depend on whoever remembered to take notes

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

Presentation Agent Investor Reporting Meeting Notes Knowledge Management

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Plaid transactions and balances on a schedule for burn and runway figures. Starch syncs your Stripe charges, invoices, and subscription data on a schedule for MRR and revenue by channel. Shopify is connected from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live when the deck needs DTC order volume or revenue. Notion is synced on a schedule and feeds the Knowledge Management wiki. Meeting Notes captures calls directly; summaries are stored in Starch and searchable across quarters. Presentation Agent (currently in beta — request access) assembles the deck from those live data sources.

Prompts to copy

Build me a 12-slide all-hands deck for our Q2 2026 team meeting. Slide 1: company snapshot with MRR, burn, and runway from Plaid and Stripe. Slide 2: top 3 wins this quarter — I'll fill in the narrative. Slides 3-5: sales by channel (DTC, Amazon, wholesale) with trend lines. Slide 6: production and inventory status — flag any SKUs below 60 days of cover. Slide 7: FSMA and compliance updates. Slides 8-9: what we're focused on next quarter and why. Slide 10: open questions for the team. Keep it tight — one idea per slide.

Summarize last quarter's all-hands meeting notes and extract every action item, who owns it, and whether it was closed before this quarter's meeting.

Create a knowledge base page called 'All-Hands Archive' that stores each quarter's deck, meeting summary, and open action items. Auto-link any follow-up Slack messages that reference those action items.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Plaid and Stripe as scheduled-sync providers so Starch always has your latest burn rate, runway, cash balance, MRR, and revenue breakdowns ready before the deck is built.

2 Connect Shopify from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can query DTC orders, AOV, and top SKUs by revenue when the deck runs.

3 Install the Investor Reporting app as a data-pull foundation — it already knows how to format burn, runway, and MRR narrative from your Plaid and Stripe data, and you can reuse that logic inside your all-hands build.

4 Open Presentation Agent and type your deck brief in plain language: number of slides, audience (internal team vs. board observer), the sections you need, and any SKU-level or channel-level callouts that matter this quarter.

5 Review the auto-generated slide outline before the agent fills in data. Add a slide for co-packer status or FSMA compliance updates if that's live this quarter — type it in as a note and the agent incorporates it.

6 Run the deck with live data pulled from your connected sources. Starch queries Shopify for channel revenue, pulls Plaid and Stripe figures for the financial slides, and drops the numbers into charts automatically.

7 Use Meeting Notes in your all-hands meeting itself: start a session at the top of the call, and it transcribes in real time so you can be present instead of typing. After the call, it generates a summary with decisions and action items.

8 Review extracted action items — who owns each one, what the deadline is — and push them into your Task Manager or Project Management app so they don't evaporate after the meeting.

9 Save the finalized deck, the meeting summary, and the action item list to your Knowledge Management wiki under an 'All-Hands Archive' page. Notion syncs on a schedule so anything you've already documented there appears alongside new entries.

10 Before the next quarter's all-hands, tell Starch: 'Pull last quarter's all-hands notes and show me which action items are still open.' Use that as your opening slide — accountability built in.

11 Iterate on the deck template once and save it as a custom starting point. Next quarter, your prompt is shorter: 'Same structure as last time, updated numbers, add a slide on the new SKU launch.' Starch builds the rest.

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 All-Hands — June 30, 2026

Sample numbers from a real run

MRR (Stripe, synced)	187,000
Burn rate (Plaid, synced)	94,000
Runway (calculated)	7
DTC revenue QTD (Shopify, live query)	312,000
Amazon FBA revenue QTD (browser automation)	148,000
Wholesale sell-through QTD	76,000
SKUs below 60-day cover	3

Going into the June 30 all-hands, the founder typed one prompt: 'Build me a 12-slide all-hands for June 30. Pull Q2 MRR and burn from Stripe and Plaid. Pull DTC revenue from Shopify. Pull Amazon FBA revenue via browser automation from Seller Central. Flag any SKUs below 60 days of inventory cover.' Starch built the deck in under four minutes. Slide 1 showed $187K MRR, $94K monthly burn, and 7 months of runway — no manual calculation. Slide 3 showed DTC at $312K for the quarter, Amazon FBA at $148K, and wholesale at $76K, with a callout that the oat-based SKU had overtaken the original line for the first time. Slide 6 flagged three SKUs — two seasonal varieties and the new 12-count multipack — as below 60 days of cover, with a note to discuss co-packer capacity in the open-questions slide. The founder spent 25 minutes editing narrative and adding context about the distributor deduction dispute, not rebuilding the structure. Meeting Notes ran during the call, and by the time the team logged off, every action item was already in the Task Manager: reorder triggered for the flagged SKUs, finance to dispute $8,400 in Whole Foods deductions, ops to confirm co-packer run dates for Q3.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Monthly burn rate and runway (months of cash at current spend)

Revenue by channel: DTC, Amazon FBA, wholesale — tracked quarter over quarter

SKU-level inventory cover in days, flagged against shelf life

Open action items from last all-hands closed before next meeting

Co-packer on-time delivery rate and production yield vs. plan

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Slides + manual data pull

Free and flexible, but every deck takes 4-6 hours of copying numbers from Shopify, Plaid, and Stripe; nothing is connected, so you rebuild from scratch every quarter.

Notion + Loom

Good for async comms and documentation, but Notion doesn't pull live financial or sales data, so the 'numbers slide' is still manual — and Starch syncs Notion data directly anyway.

Beautiful.ai or Canva

Faster slide design than Google Slides, but still requires you to populate every data point manually; no connection to Stripe, Plaid, or Shopify.

Pitch.com

Solid collaborative deck tool with real-time editing, but no native data sync from your financial or ops stack; your team edits a static snapshot, not a live document.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — presentation agent, investor reporting, meeting notes 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 Presentation Agent available right now?

Presentation Agent is currently in development. You can request beta access to get notified when it launches. In the meantime, you can use Starch's Meeting Notes, Investor Reporting, and Knowledge Management apps today — and describe the deck structure you want to Starch's agent, which can draft slide outlines and pull data even before the full Presentation Agent is live.

Can Starch pull Amazon FBA revenue and inventory data for the deck?

Yes. Starch automates Amazon Seller Central through your browser — no API required. It can pull revenue, unit sales, FBA inventory levels, and restock alerts. There's also a pre-built Amazon Seller Dashboard app in the App Store you can install as a starting point.

What if my wholesale data lives in a distributor portal like UNFI or KeHE and not in a standard SaaS tool?

Starch automates any website you can log into through your browser — no API needed. If your distributor portal is browser-accessible, Starch can pull sell-through reports, deduction summaries, or inventory snapshots from it and incorporate them into your deck or dashboard.

Will Starch store my past all-hands decks so I can reference them?

Yes. The Knowledge Management app keeps a searchable archive of your documents, meeting notes, and linked files. Starch also syncs your Notion workspace on a schedule if that's where your team already stores docs — so you're not starting a new system from scratch.

Our QuickBooks has our full P&L. Can the deck pull from there?

Starch syncs QuickBooks entity-level data on a schedule — invoices, bills, payments, vendors, and journal entries. Note: QuickBooks report views like the formatted P&L and Transaction List are temporarily unavailable due to an upstream connector issue, but entity-level data syncs normally. For a P&L summary in your deck, Starch can reconstruct it from synced journal entries and invoice data.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We share financial data in these decks.

Starch is not yet SOC 2 Type II certified. If that's a hard requirement for your team's data policy, it's worth knowing upfront. Most early-stage CPG founders running on Plaid and Stripe already accept similar data-access trade-offs with other tools, but we want to be straight with you about where things stand.

How long does it actually take to build the deck once everything is connected?

Once your data sources are connected — Plaid, Stripe, Shopify, and whatever else feeds your slides — and you've written your deck brief once, subsequent quarters take 20-30 minutes of editing rather than 4-6 hours of building. The first setup run takes longer because you're wiring the connections and dialing in the slide structure, but you do that once and reuse it.