Internal Comms & Meetings

How to prepare an all-hands deck as Small Finance Teams

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Small Finance Teams2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Every quarter, your three-person team spends three days building the all-hands deck. You pull the P&L from NetSuite or QuickBooks, copy cash figures from Plaid, paste Stripe MRR into a Google Sheet, manually calculate department spend variances, then rebuild charts in Google Slides that break every time a number changes. Someone always asks for gross margin by product line the morning of the meeting. By the time the deck is final it's 11pm the night before, two of you have touched the same slide, and the CFO has sent five 'can you just update the burn number' messages. The data was always there. The three days were pure formatting and chasing.

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Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Small Finance Teams2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live financial data surface that pulls directly from your QuickBooks or NetSuite close, Stripe MRR, and Plaid cash balances — so the numbers in your deck are always current without a manual export

An AI-drafted deck narrative that turns your month-end actuals into plain-English commentary on burn, headcount costs, gross margin, and departmental variances — formatted and ready to edit, not to build from scratch

A repeatable workflow that compresses three days of deck prep into a few hours of review, so close week doesn't also become slides week

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

Investor Reporting Presentation Agent

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule — invoices, bills, payments, journal entries, and vendor data — so actuals are current without a manual export. Starch also syncs your Stripe data on a schedule for MRR, charges, and subscription metrics, and your Plaid data on a schedule for cash balances and categorized transactions. The Presentation Agent builds slide decks from those synced figures plus a text description of what you want — no separate export step required.

Prompts to copy

Pull our QuickBooks actuals for Q1 2026 — net revenue, COGS, gross margin by product line, and total opex by department. Compare to Q4 2025 and flag any line items that moved more than 10%. Write a two-paragraph CFO narrative explaining the variances.

Build a 12-slide all-hands deck for our March 2026 company meeting. Slide 1: company scorecard with revenue, burn, and headcount. Slides 2–4: financial results with gross margin, opex breakdown, and cash runway. Slide 5: what we said we'd do last quarter vs. what happened. Slides 6–9: department updates (I'll fill these in). Slide 10: top 3 priorities for Q2. Slide 11: risks and mitigants. Slide 12: open Q&A prompt. Use our actual Q1 numbers from the investor reporting app.

Generate a gross margin by product line table for Q1 2026 using our Stripe revenue data and QuickBooks COGS, formatted as a slide-ready chart.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect QuickBooks (or NetSuite) to Starch — Starch syncs your chart of accounts, invoices, bills, journal entries, and vendor data on a schedule so your close figures are always available without re-exporting.

2 Connect Stripe and Plaid — Starch syncs MRR, subscription data, cash balances, and categorized transactions on a schedule, giving you the three financial pillars (revenue, cash, burn) in one place.

3 Open the Investor Reporting app from the Starch App Store as your starting point — it already knows how to pull burn rate, runway, and MRR growth from your connected sources.

4 Prompt Starch to run a variance analysis: 'Compare Q1 2026 actuals vs. Q4 2025 across net revenue, COGS, gross margin, and opex by department. Flag anything over 10% movement and explain likely causes.' Review the output and add any context Starch couldn't know — a one-time vendor payment, a headcount change mid-quarter.

5 Prompt Starch to write the financial narrative section: 'Draft CFO commentary for our Q1 all-hands covering revenue performance, gross margin trend, burn rate, and cash runway. Keep it to 250 words, factual tone, no fluff.' Edit for voice but not for math.

6 Use the Presentation Agent to scaffold the full deck: describe the structure you want (company scorecard, financial results, last quarter vs. plan, Q2 priorities, risks) and Starch builds slides with layouts and data visualizations pulled from your connected sources.

7 Drop in the variance analysis and CFO narrative from step 5 into the financial slides — copy-paste or reference directly if your workflow keeps it in Starch.

8 For the gross margin by product line slide (the one the CEO always asks for mid-close), prompt: 'Show gross margin by product line for Q1 2026 using Stripe revenue and QuickBooks COGS, formatted as a bar chart.' Export as a slide-ready image or embed directly.

9 Assign department owners their slides — sales, engineering, product — and tell them to fill in narrative. Starch holds the financial slides; they own their section.

10 Run a final numbers check: prompt Starch to verify that all figures in the deck match the synced QuickBooks and Stripe data. It will flag any slide where a number looks inconsistent.

11 Export the finished deck to PowerPoint or PDF for the meeting, or share the Starch link directly with leadership for async review before the all-hands.

12 After the meeting, save the final deck and CFO narrative in Starch as a reference point — next quarter's variance analysis will automatically compare against this period.

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

March 2026 Q1 All-Hands — 200-person company, 3-person finance team

Sample numbers from a real run

Net Revenue (Q1 2026)	4,120,000
COGS	1,484,000
Gross Profit	2,636,000
Gross Margin %	64
Total Opex	2,890,000
Net Burn (monthly avg)	84,700
Cash on Hand (end of March)	6,800,000
Runway (months)	80
MRR (end of March)	1,420,000

The Q1 all-hands was scheduled for April 8. In past quarters the finance team started building the deck on April 1 — seven days of pulling QuickBooks reports, formatting in Google Sheets, rebuilding charts after the CFO changed the burn methodology, and chasing department heads for their slides. This quarter, Starch had already synced Q1 actuals from QuickBooks and Stripe by March 31. On April 2, the analyst prompted: 'Compare Q1 2026 actuals to Q4 2025 across revenue, gross margin, and opex by department. Flag variances over 10%.' Starch flagged two: engineering opex was up 18% quarter-over-quarter ($340K vs $288K), driven by three new hires in February, and COGS improved 4 points to 36% as the team sunset a legacy infrastructure contract. The CFO narrative was drafted in 20 minutes and needed one edit — the infrastructure context wasn't in any connected system, so the analyst added a sentence. The Presentation Agent scaffolded a 12-slide deck from the structure prompt, pre-populated with the Q1 actuals, gross margin by product line from Stripe + QuickBooks, and a cash runway chart showing 80 months at current burn. Department heads filled in slides 6–9 async. The deck was finalized by April 5, three days earlier than usual, and the one mid-close CEO question — 'what's gross margin on the enterprise tier specifically?' — was answered in four minutes with a Starch query instead of a 45-minute detour through QuickBooks reports.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Days to close all-hands deck from quarter-end (target: under 3 business days)

Gross margin by product line (tracked quarterly, compared to prior period)

Net burn rate (monthly average, derived from Plaid cash movements and QuickBooks opex)

Cash runway in months (cash on hand ÷ average monthly burn)

Opex variance by department vs. prior quarter (flagged at >10% movement)

Comparison

What this replaces

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

NetSuite or QuickBooks native reports + Google Slides

Your ERP generates accurate ledger reports but has no concept of slide structure, narrative, or variance commentary — you still spend two to three days translating data into a deck every quarter.

Google Sheets + Slides with linked data

Linked Sheets-to-Slides breaks every time someone changes a row, and it still requires a manual export from your ERP — you get version-control headaches without reducing the underlying data-wrangling work.

Mosaic or Pigment (financial planning platforms)

Purpose-built for FP&A modeling with strong ERP integrations, but they are expensive for a 3-person team, focused on forecasting rather than all-hands narrative, and won't build your deck or write your CFO commentary.

Notion AI or Confluence for narrative drafting

Good for writing assistance once you've gathered the numbers, but they have no live connection to your QuickBooks, Stripe, or Plaid data — you're still doing the extraction step manually before they can help.

Hiring a financial analyst or EA to own the deck

Solves the bandwidth problem but at $80–120K fully loaded for a role whose primary output is a quarterly slide deck — Starch handles the same data-to-narrative pipeline for a fraction of the cost and runs between quarters too.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — investor reporting, presentation agent 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

We use NetSuite, not QuickBooks. Does Starch sync NetSuite actuals directly?

Yes. Starch syncs your NetSuite data on a schedule — invoices, expenses, journal entries, balance sheets, and income statements. The all-hands workflow described here works the same way whether your ledger lives in NetSuite or QuickBooks.

The CFO wants gross margin broken out by product line. Can Starch actually do that, or does it just pull top-line gross margin?

Starch can cross-reference your Stripe subscription and charge data (synced on a schedule) with your QuickBooks COGS data to build a product-line gross margin table. You'd prompt something like: 'Calculate gross margin by product line for Q1 2026 using Stripe revenue by product and QuickBooks COGS by account.' You may need to map COGS accounts to product lines the first time — Starch will ask you to confirm the mapping and remember it for next quarter.

What about the QuickBooks P&L report view — can Starch pull that directly?

QuickBooks report views (P&L, Transaction List, Vendor Expenses) are temporarily disabled in Starch while an upstream fix is in progress. Entity-level data — bills, invoices, payments, vendors, journal entries — syncs normally. For all-hands purposes, Starch builds the P&L view from entity-level data rather than the native QuickBooks report, which gives you more flexibility in how it's sliced anyway.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We'd be connecting our ERP and bank data.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your company requires SOC 2 Type II for any tool that touches financial data, that's worth raising with your security or compliance team before connecting QuickBooks, Plaid, or Stripe.

What happens if a department head updates their slide section and it conflicts with a number in the financial slides?

Starch doesn't automatically detect cross-slide conflicts — that's a human review step. We recommend one person running a final prompt before the meeting: 'Check all financial figures in this deck against our synced QuickBooks and Stripe data and flag anything that looks inconsistent.' That catches stale numbers but won't catch narrative contradictions in a department head's qualitative commentary.

We use Ramp for expense management. Can Starch pull Ramp data for the opex breakdown?

Ramp is available through Starch's integration catalog of 3,000+ apps; the agent queries it live when your app runs. Alternatively, if Ramp syncs to QuickBooks (which it typically does), your categorized expenses are already available through the QuickBooks scheduled sync.

How long does the Presentation Agent take to actually build the deck?

The Presentation Agent is currently in development — you can request beta access to get notified when it launches. The financial data surfaces (variance analysis, gross margin by product line, CFO narrative draft) work today through Investor Reporting and custom Starch apps built on your connected QuickBooks, Stripe, and Plaid data.

We do this all-hands monthly, not quarterly. Does the workflow change?

Monthly cadence works the same way — the scheduled syncs keep your QuickBooks and Stripe data current, so you're always working from the latest close rather than a stale export. The main adjustment is templating your prompt so the structure stays consistent month to month, which Starch can remember and reuse.