Internal Comms & Meetings

How to prepare an all-hands deck as Small Law and Accounting Practices

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Small Law and Accounting Practices4 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Preparing the quarterly all-hands at a six-attorney firm or four-CPA practice means one managing partner spending most of a Saturday pulling billable-hour summaries from QuickBooks, chasing utilization numbers from Clio or Karbon, reconstructing client wins from Outlook threads, and building slides in PowerPoint from scratch. There's no marketing team to hand it to and no chief of staff to delegate it to. The result is usually a deck that's half-finished, leans on memory instead of data, and arrives in the shared drive the morning of the meeting. Nobody leaves knowing what the numbers actually mean for next quarter.

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Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Small Law and Accounting Practices4 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A connected data pull that gathers financials from QuickBooks, calendar activity from Outlook, and practice-management context so you're not reconstructing numbers from memory on a Friday night

A structured slide deck built from a plain-language description of your firm's quarter — practice group performance, key client matters, deadline load, hiring, and what the next 90 days look like

A reusable all-hands template you can update each quarter in under an hour by telling Starch what changed

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 Knowledge Management Meeting Notes

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule — revenue, WIP, collections, and vendor payments refresh automatically so the financials on your deck reflect the actual close, not last week's export. Connect Outlook from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live for partner email threads and calendar event history when building your deck context. Google Calendar or Outlook calendar syncs on a schedule and feeds meeting history to Meeting Notes. Your practice management tool (Clio, Karbon, or MyCase) is reachable from Starch's integration catalog of 3,000+ apps if it has an API, or Starch automates it through your browser — no API needed — to pull matter status, client lists, and deadline data.

Prompts to copy

Build me a 12-slide all-hands deck for our firm's Q2 2026 review. Slides should cover: revenue vs. target from QuickBooks, billable hours by practice group, top five client matters by fee collected, two new hires and their start dates, three risks heading into Q3, and a 90-day priorities slide. Tone should be direct — partners who've been here 15 years and paralegals who started last month are both in the room.

Summarize our Q2 financials from QuickBooks — net revenue, WIP balance, collected vs. billed by practice group — and write a three-paragraph narrative I can read aloud to open the all-hands. Flag any line where we missed budget by more than 10%.

Pull all meeting notes tagged 'partner meeting' from the last 90 days and give me a list of decisions we made and commitments we haven't closed out yet. I want to put these on a 'what we said we'd do' slide.

Archive today's all-hands notes, tag decisions and action items by owner, and add the key policy decisions to our firm knowledge base so the associate who joins in August can find them.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect QuickBooks to Starch as a scheduled-sync provider. Revenue, collections, WIP balances, and expense categories will refresh on a schedule so you're not manually exporting a P&L the night before the all-hands.

2 Connect Outlook from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can query partner email threads and calendar history live — this is how Starch pulls client-matter context and meeting cadence without you summarizing it manually.

3 Set up Meeting Notes for your recurring partner meetings. For the next 90 days, every partner meeting gets transcribed, summarized, and tagged with decisions and open action items automatically — so your 'what we committed to' slide writes itself.

4 Connect your practice management tool (Clio, Karbon, MyCase, or TaxDome) from Starch's integration catalog, or tell Starch to automate it through your browser if a direct connection isn't available. The agent will pull matter status, active client counts, and deadline load.

5 Open Presentation Agent and describe your all-hands deck in plain language: number of slides, sections you want, the audience (partners plus staff), and the tone. Starch builds the deck structure immediately — you don't start from a blank slide.

6 Ask Starch to populate the financials slides by querying your synced QuickBooks data: net revenue vs. target, collections by practice group, WIP aging, and any line items that missed budget by more than 10%.

7 Ask Starch to pull your Meeting Notes archive from the last quarter and surface the decisions made, commitments outstanding, and any recurring agenda items that never got resolved. These become your 'where we are on what we said' slide.

8 Review the draft deck in Presentation Agent. Edit any slide by describing the change — 'replace the bar chart with a table,' 'add a column for Q3 target,' 'make the risk slide one sentence per bullet instead of paragraphs' — without touching the design layer.

9 Export the final deck to PowerPoint or PDF and drop it in your shared drive. Starch generates a plain-text summary you can email to partners in advance so nobody walks in cold.

10 Run the all-hands. Afterward, use Meeting Notes to capture what was said, what decisions were made, and what each partner committed to before Q3 close.

11 Ask Starch to push key policy decisions and firm-wide commitments from the all-hands into your Knowledge Management wiki, tagged by practice group and date, so they're searchable when a new hire or junior associate needs context.

12 At the start of next quarter, open the same Presentation Agent session and tell Starch what changed — headcount, major client matters closed, any new practice group focus. It updates the deck from the prior quarter's template rather than starting over.

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 — Midsize Litigation and Tax Practice, July 2026

Sample numbers from a real run

Collected revenue (Q2)	1,840,000
Billed but uncollected (WIP)	312,000
Budget target (Q2)	1,950,000
Variance to target	-110,000
Litigation practice — collected	1,020,000
Tax practice — collected	820,000
Average billable hours per attorney (Q2)	187
Target billable hours per attorney	200

The managing partner at a six-attorney litigation and tax firm used to spend the Saturday before the July all-hands pulling a QuickBooks P&L, asking two partners to email their matter summaries, and building slides until midnight. This quarter she told Starch: 'Build me a 12-slide all-hands deck for Q2. Pull our QuickBooks revenue and WIP, break it out by litigation versus tax, flag where we missed target, and add a section on the three client matters that generated the most fees.' Starch pulled the synced QuickBooks data and surfaced the story immediately: $1.84M collected against a $1.95M target, a $312K WIP balance aging past 60 days in the tax practice, and litigation running at 187 average billable hours per attorney versus a 200-hour target. The deck opened with those numbers, flagged the WIP aging as the primary risk slide, and pulled the top three matters by collected fees from the Clio data Starch queried through the browser. She spent 45 minutes reviewing and editing rather than 6 hours building. The Meeting Notes summary from the all-hands itself went straight into the firm's Knowledge Management wiki, so the associate starting in August could read what the partners decided about the new estate planning expansion without anyone having to brief her separately.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Collected revenue vs. budget by practice group (litigation, tax, or transactional)

Average billable hours per attorney vs. target, tracked monthly

WIP balance aging — how much billed revenue is outstanding past 30, 60, 90 days

Realization rate — collected fees as a percentage of fees billed

Time from all-hands prep start to deck-complete (the metric most managing partners won't admit exists)

Comparison

What this replaces

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

PowerPoint or Google Slides built manually

Full design control, but every number is copy-pasted by hand from QuickBooks or Clio exports, which means Saturday nights in slides and a deck that's already stale by Monday morning.

QuickBooks reporting + Excel

Accurate financial data, but no narrative, no slides, no practice-group context, and still requires someone to assemble the story manually from three separate exports.

Clio or Karbon built-in reporting

Good for matter-level and utilization data inside the practice management tool, but won't touch your financials, won't build a deck, and won't synthesize partner commitments from prior meeting notes.

Hiring a consultant or fractional COO to run the all-hands prep

Gets it done without the managing partner's weekend, but costs $500–$1,500 per quarter and still requires you to hand off all the same data they'd need to pull anyway.

Notion or Confluence as a knowledge base + Canva for slides

Reasonable for teams that have already organized their docs, but there's no live connection to QuickBooks or your practice management tool, so the numbers on the deck are still typed in by hand.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — presentation agent, investor reporting, knowledge management 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 connect to Clio or MyCase directly?

If Clio or MyCase has an API, it's reachable from Starch's integration catalog of 3,000+ apps. If the connection isn't available as a direct integration, Starch can automate it through your browser — log in, navigate to the matter list or billing summary, and pull what it needs — no API required. Tell Starch what data you need from your practice management tool and it will find a path.

What QuickBooks data does Starch actually sync? Can it pull a P&L for the all-hands?

Starch syncs QuickBooks entities on a schedule — invoices, bills, payments, vendors, and journal entries. That's enough to build a collected-revenue summary, WIP aging analysis, and expense breakdown by category for your all-hands. Note: QuickBooks report views like the built-in P&L and Transaction List report are temporarily unavailable due to an upstream connector issue, but the underlying entity data syncs normally, and Starch can construct the equivalent from that data.

We use Outlook, not Gmail. Does that matter?

No. Starch connects directly to Outlook — messages, calendar events, and contacts — the same way it connects to Gmail. For an all-hands prep workflow, Outlook calendar history and partner email threads are both reachable.

We only do an all-hands twice a year. Is it worth setting this up?

The setup pays off faster than twice a year because the same connections — QuickBooks sync, Outlook, your practice management tool — feed other workflows year-round: client status emails, deadline dashboards, and partner billing reports. The all-hands deck is one output of a connected practice; it just happens to be the most visible one.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We handle client financial data.

Not yet — Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. If your firm's data governance policy requires SOC 2 before connecting financial or client data, that's a real constraint worth naming. It's on the roadmap. For now, whether Starch fits depends on how your firm handles similar questions with other cloud tools you already use.

Can Starch build the deck in our firm's template, not some generic layout?

Presentation Agent lets you describe the design requirements — color scheme, section order, slide structure — and iterate on individual slides by describing the change you want. Direct upload of a proprietary firm template is not currently supported, but you can describe the format and export to PowerPoint for final formatting adjustments.

What happens to the all-hands notes and decisions after the meeting?

Meeting Notes captures the transcript, generates a summary with key decisions and action items, and archives it in a searchable history. You can then ask Starch to push specific decisions or commitments into your Knowledge Management wiki so they're findable when a partner or new hire needs context — without anyone having to manually write up the minutes.