Finance & FP&A

How to prepare audit and tax workpapers as Asset Management Founders

Finance & FP&AFor Asset Management Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

When your auditors or tax prep team asks for workpapers, you're pulling bank statements from Plaid, exporting invoices from QuickBooks, digging through a Google Drive folder for executed contracts, and manually reconciling everything in a spreadsheet that's already two weeks stale. You don't have a controller. You don't have a staff accountant. The fund admin handles the fund-level numbers, but your management company books — payroll, vendor contracts, management fees receivable — live scattered across three systems you're querying one at a time. Prep work that should take a day takes a week, and auditors bill by the hour.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Finance & FP&AFor Asset Management Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live workpaper dashboard pulling management company transactions from Plaid and entity-level QuickBooks data — invoices, bills, vendor payments, journal entries — reconciled and labeled so auditors see a clean, dated package instead of a Dropbox full of exports

An automated transaction categorization and anomaly log that flags anything unusual before your auditors do, so you're not surprised during fieldwork

A contract and obligation tracker (via Contract Lifecycle Management, coming soon) that surfaces every service provider agreement, its term dates, and fee schedules — the supporting documentation auditors always ask for

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

Transaction Insights Investor Reporting Contract Lifecycle Management

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Plaid transaction data on a schedule and connects directly to QuickBooks — pulling invoices, bills, vendor payments, and journal entries (50,000 entities per type). The Investor Reporting app uses both as its backbone. For contract documentation, Contract Lifecycle Management (coming soon) will add a searchable repository with full audit trail; until then, Starch connects to Notion from the integration catalog and the agent queries it live when building supporting schedules.

Prompts to copy

Pull all transactions from my connected Plaid accounts for Q1 2026, categorize them by vendor and expense type, and flag any transactions over $5,000 or any vendor that appeared fewer than three times in the prior six months

Build me a management company P&L workpaper for the twelve months ending December 2025, pulling QuickBooks bills, invoices, payments, and journal entries. Group by expense category, show month-by-month, and highlight any line where actual spend deviated more than 20% from the prior quarter average

Create a supporting schedule that lists every recurring vendor charge from Plaid — amount, frequency, and first/last seen date — formatted as a workpaper exhibit I can hand to my auditors

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect your management company bank and credit card accounts via Plaid. Starch syncs transactions on a schedule — categorized, timestamped, and queryable from day one.

2 Connect QuickBooks to Starch. The scheduled sync pulls invoices, bills, payments, vendors, and journal entries so your workpapers reflect the same books your CPA is reconciling against.

3 Open the Transaction Insights app and tell Starch: 'Categorize all Q1 2026 transactions by expense type and flag anything over $5,000 or any new vendor that charged us in the last 60 days.' This becomes your anomaly exhibit.

4 Use the Investor Reporting app to pull a management company income statement. Prompt: 'Build a P&L for my management company for FY2025, using QuickBooks entity data, broken down by month and expense category.' Export as your primary workpaper.

5 Reconcile the Plaid transaction feed against QuickBooks vendor payments. Prompt Starch: 'Show me all vendor payments in QuickBooks for Q4 2025 alongside the matching Plaid transactions, and flag any QuickBooks entry with no corresponding bank transaction.'

6 Build a management fee receivable schedule. Prompt: 'Pull all invoices from QuickBooks for FY2025 where the customer is one of my fund entities, show invoice date, due date, amount, and payment status, and calculate total fees earned versus collected.'

7 Assemble a payroll and benefits schedule. Starch connects directly to Paylocity or ADP on a scheduled sync — prompt: 'Summarize all payroll runs for FY2025, total by quarter, and break out salary versus benefits versus employer taxes.'

8 Stitch your supporting contracts. Until Contract Lifecycle Management launches (coming soon), connect Notion from Starch's integration catalog and prompt: 'Find all pages in my Notion workspace tagged as vendor contracts and list the counterparty, effective date, term, and fee schedule for each.' This feeds your auditors' contract testing.

9 Create a recurring subscriptions exhibit from Plaid. Prompt: 'List every recurring charge in my Plaid accounts over the last 12 months — vendor, amount, frequency, and total annual spend — sorted by annual total.' Auditors ask for this every year.

10 Build a final workpaper index. Prompt: 'Create a table of contents listing each workpaper exhibit I've built this session — title, data source, period covered, and date generated — so I can attach it as the cover page of my audit package.'

11 Save each output as a named workpaper inside Starch. Because the underlying data connections are live, any exhibit can be regenerated the moment auditors request a revised cut — no re-exporting, no reformatting.

12 When auditors send a PBC (prepared by client) list, paste it into Starch and prompt: 'Cross-reference this PBC list against the workpapers I've already built and tell me which items are covered and which still need to be pulled.' This turns a week of triage into an afternoon.

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

FY2025 Audit Prep — Emerging Equity Fund Management Company, March 2026 Close

Sample numbers from a real run

Management fees earned (fund invoices)	480,000
Management fees collected (Plaid receipts)	455,000
Fees receivable (reconciling item)	25,000
Salary and benefits (Paylocity sync)	310,000
Rent and office (Plaid, recurring)	48,000
Fund admin and audit fees (QuickBooks bills)	62,000
Travel and entertainment (Plaid, flagged anomaly)	31,000
Software subscriptions (Plaid, recurring schedule)	18,400

For this $120M AUM fund in year three of operations, audit prep had previously taken the founder and part-time CFO nine days of manual work. Using Starch, the QuickBooks scheduled sync surfaced $62,000 in fund admin and audit bills, all matched to vendor payments in the Plaid feed — except one $4,800 invoice from the fund's legal counsel that had been entered in QuickBooks but never paid. That reconciling item would have surfaced during fieldwork; instead it surfaced in step five of the workpaper build. The management fee receivable schedule showed $25,000 outstanding from Fund II — the quarterly invoice had been sent but the ACH hadn't cleared by year-end, a timing difference the auditors needed documented. The anomaly log flagged a $9,200 T&E charge in November — a conference sponsorship that had been coded to meals. The Paylocity sync confirmed $310,000 in total comp across two full-time employees, matching W-2 totals exactly. Total time to assemble the initial workpaper package: one afternoon.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Days to deliver complete PBC package to auditors (target: under 5 business days after year-end)

Management fee earned vs. collected variance (fees receivable balance at year-end)

Number of audit adjustments proposed by auditors vs. prior year (workpaper quality proxy)

Vendor anomalies flagged by Starch vs. auditor-identified issues (internal control effectiveness)

Total audit and tax preparation fees as a percentage of management company revenue

Comparison

What this replaces

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

QuickBooks + manual Excel workpapers

You're already paying for QuickBooks; the gap is the 8 hours spent exporting, formatting, and reconciling — Starch does that work, but doesn't replace QuickBooks as your books of record.

Juniper Square or Allvue

Built for fund-level administration and LP reporting, not management company audit prep; pricing starts where Starch's entire annual cost ends, and they still won't pull your bank feed and build workpapers for you.

Floqast or Numeric (close management tools)

Purpose-built for accounting close workflows with strong reconciliation features, but require a controller to configure and maintain — not designed for a founder running the process themselves.

Google Drive folder of exports + CPA

Zero incremental cost, but your CPA bills hourly for the time spent chasing documents you could have pre-assembled; the real cost is audit prep fees and the week you spend on it instead of LPs.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — transaction insights, investor reporting, contract lifecycle 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 actually have access to my QuickBooks P&L and trial balance, or just transactions?

Starch syncs entity-level QuickBooks data on a schedule — invoices, bills, payments, vendors, journal entries, and more. One honest limit: QuickBooks report views like the pre-formatted P&L and Transaction List are temporarily disabled pending a connector fix. What's available now is the underlying entity data, which is what you'd use to build your own workpaper-formatted P&L inside Starch anyway. If you need the canned QuickBooks report exports, pull those directly from QuickBooks and attach them to your package.

Can Starch pull from NetSuite if my management company books are there instead of QuickBooks?

Yes. Starch connects directly to NetSuite on a scheduled sync, pulling invoices, expenses, journal entries, balance sheets, and income statements. The Investor Reporting app uses NetSuite as a primary connection — you'd use the same approach to build management company workpapers.

What if my fund admin uses a portal I'd normally log into through a browser — can Starch pull that data?

If the portal doesn't have an API in Starch's integration catalog, Starch automates it through your browser — no API needed. You'd set up a browser automation that logs in, navigates to the relevant report, and extracts the data on a schedule. This is a first-class Starch pattern, not a workaround.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? My auditors will ask.

Not yet — Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. That's worth knowing before you use it for sensitive financial workpaper prep. It's on the roadmap; in the meantime, you control which data sources you connect and what gets stored.

What about Contract Lifecycle Management for pulling executed vendor agreements? That's always on the PBC list.

Contract Lifecycle Management is currently in development — you can request beta access to be notified when it launches. It will include a searchable repository with full audit trail, which is exactly what auditors are asking for when they test vendor contracts. Until then, if your contracts live in Notion, Starch connects to Notion from its integration catalog and can query and summarize contract pages for your workpaper package.

Can I use Starch to prep both the management company audit AND the fund-level audit workpapers?

The management company books (your operating entity) are where Starch adds the most direct value — Plaid for bank activity, QuickBooks or NetSuite for books, Paylocity or ADP for payroll. Fund-level workpapers typically live with your fund administrator; Starch can pull fund-admin portal data via browser automation and cross-reference it against your own records, but it's not a replacement for your fund admin's audit deliverables.