Finance & FP&A

How to prepare audit and tax workpapers as Small Investor Relations Teams

Finance & FP&AFor Small Investor Relations Teams3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

As a two-person IR team, your audit and tax workpaper prep looks like this: your CFO emails you a list of LP capital account balances that need to reconcile against your QuickBooks journal entries, which don't match the figures in your quarterly LP letter, which were pulled from a Plaid export three weeks ago. You spend two days manually pulling transactions, cross-referencing commitment schedules in a Google Sheet no one else maintains, and chasing your fund admin for a reconciled trial balance. Your auditors want a support package by Friday. You have no IR-ops analyst. You build the workpapers yourself, in Excel, while also fielding LP questions about their K-1s.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Finance & FP&AFor Small Investor Relations Teams3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live workpaper dashboard that pulls QuickBooks journal entries, Plaid transactions, and Stripe payment records on a schedule — so your support package reflects numbers that are actually current when your auditors open it

An automated transaction reconciliation surface that flags mismatches between LP capital calls recorded in QuickBooks and cash movements in your Plaid-connected accounts, organized by fund entity

A searchable document layer that maps every audit finding to the source transaction, LP commitment, or journal entry that supports it — so you stop re-pulling the same data when your auditors ask follow-up questions

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 Transaction Insights Knowledge Management

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule — 20+ entities including journal entries, invoices, bills, vendor payments, and balance sheet items. Starch syncs your Plaid bank transaction data on a schedule, pulling categorized transactions and balances across all connected accounts. Starch syncs your Stripe charge and payout data on a schedule for any management fee or capital call collected through Stripe. For LP portal data sitting behind DocSend, Intralinks, or your fund admin's portal, Starch automates those sites through your browser — no API needed. Document templates and prior-year workpapers stored in Notion sync on a schedule and surface through the Knowledge Management app.

Prompts to copy

Build me a workpaper dashboard that pulls our QuickBooks journal entries and Plaid bank transactions side by side, grouped by fund entity and quarter, and flags any line item where the recorded capital call doesn't match the cash received in the corresponding Plaid account

Create a spend analysis view from our Plaid-connected accounts that shows all LP-related disbursements — management fees, carried interest payments, and capital distributions — with month-over-month variance flagged automatically so I can attach it as a support schedule to our audit package

Set up a knowledge base that stores every audit workpaper template, reconciliation memo, and prior-year auditor request list in one searchable place, so when our auditors ask the same question they asked in 2024 I can find the answer in ten seconds

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect QuickBooks to Starch — Starch syncs your journal entries, invoices, bills, vendor payments, and balance sheet on a schedule. This is the foundation of every reconciliation your auditors will ask for.

2 Connect your Plaid-linked bank accounts — Starch syncs categorized transactions and running balances on a schedule, giving you the cash-side of every capital call, distribution, and fee payment.

3 If you process capital calls or management fees through Stripe, connect Stripe — Starch syncs charges, payouts, and customer records on a schedule so collections are reconcilable against your QuickBooks AR.

4 Start from the Investor Reporting app in the Starch App Store. Fork it and tell Starch: 'Add a reconciliation tab that compares QuickBooks capital account entries against Plaid cash receipts by LP name and quarter, and highlight rows where the difference is greater than $500.'

5 Use Transaction Insights to pull a categorized view of all fund-level disbursements from Plaid. Tell Starch: 'Show me every outbound transaction tagged as a distribution or fee payment in the last 12 months, grouped by month, with a flag on any amount that's more than 15% different from the same month last year.'

6 For LP commitment schedules or capital account statements sitting in your fund admin's portal, tell Starch: 'Log into [fund admin portal URL], navigate to the capital account summary for Fund II, and pull the LP-level balance table into my workpaper dashboard.' Starch automates this through your browser — no API needed.

7 Wire your Notion workspace to Starch — Starch syncs your pages and databases on a schedule. Set up the Knowledge Management app and load it with your audit workpaper templates, PBC (prepared-by-client) checklists, and prior-year auditor request lists.

8 Build an audit request tracker: tell Starch 'Create an app that lets me log each auditor request with a status, a linked source document or transaction, and a due date — and Slack me every morning with any open items that are due within 48 hours.'

9 Build a tax support schedule view: tell Starch 'Pull all QuickBooks journal entries tagged to carried interest, management fees, or fund expenses for the fiscal year, and produce a summary table formatted like our Schedule K-1 support workpaper with entity, amount, and GL code columns.'

10 Once the draft workpaper package is assembled, tell Starch: 'Compare the LP capital account balances in my QuickBooks sync against the commitment schedule in my Notion database and list any LP where the two figures differ by more than $1,000.' Resolve those before sending to auditors.

11 Schedule a weekly automation: 'Every Monday, refresh the workpaper dashboard from QuickBooks and Plaid, flag any new transactions posted since last week that affect fund-level accounts, and post a summary to the #finance Slack channel.' This keeps your workpapers from going stale mid-audit.

12 After audit closes, archive the final workpaper set: tell Starch 'Save a snapshot of this quarter's reconciliation views, the auditor request log, and all supporting transaction exports to our Notion audit archive database, tagged with Q1 2026 and marked final.'

See this running on Starch

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Worked example

Q1 2026 Audit Close — Fund II, $85M AUM

Sample numbers from a real run

LP Capital Calls Receivable (QuickBooks AR)	3,400,000
Cash Received — Capital Calls (Plaid, Q1 2026)	3,375,000
Reconciling difference flagged by Starch	25,000
Management Fees Collected (Stripe, Q1 2026)	212,500
Management Fees Recognized (QuickBooks revenue)	212,500
Fund Expenses — G&A (QuickBooks, Q1 2026)	48,300
Plaid-categorized fund expenses, Q1 2026	47,900
Unexplained variance (flagged for review)	400

Going into Q1 2026 audit, your auditors requested a full reconciliation of LP capital calls against cash received, plus a management fee support schedule and a fund expense detail. In a previous year, this took you three days. With Starch, you opened the forked Investor Reporting app and the workpaper reconciliation tab pulled $3.4M in QuickBooks AR against $3.375M in Plaid cash receipts — a $25,000 gap surfaced immediately. Starch flagged two LPs: one whose wire cleared on April 2 (just outside Q1) and one whose $18,000 call was partially offset by a credit memo your fund admin had issued but not communicated to you. You resolved both within two hours and attached the reconciliation export directly to your PBC package. The management fee reconciliation was clean — $212,500 in Stripe payouts matched $212,500 in QuickBooks revenue to the dollar. The G&A variance of $400 traced to a Plaid-categorized software subscription that had been coded to a personal card by mistake. Total auditor prep time: six hours across two days, down from three days. Your auditors got a workpaper package with source-linked support for every line item, and you didn't miss a single LP question during the review window.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Days to close audit workpaper package after quarter-end

Number of open auditor PBC requests at day 10 of audit window

LP capital call reconciliation variance (target: $0 unexplained)

Management fee collection rate — Stripe collected vs. QuickBooks invoiced

Time spent on manual data pulls per audit cycle (hours)

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 accounting and LP reporting but costs $50k+ per year, assumes a dedicated IR-ops analyst, and doesn't let you build custom reconciliation surfaces without professional services involvement.

Excel + QuickBooks exports

Zero marginal cost and your auditors will accept it, but every refresh is manual, version control is a disaster when two people are editing the same workbook, and you rebuild the same formulas from scratch every quarter.

Google Sheets + Plaid API (DIY)

Flexible and cheap, but someone has to maintain the API connection, the schema breaks when Plaid updates it, and you've traded audit prep time for engineering time you don't have.

NetSuite with IR module

Deep ERP and financial reporting capability, but implementation takes months, costs scale with complexity, and it's architected for a finance team of ten — not two people who also run LP communications.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — investor reporting, transaction insights, 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 actually sync our QuickBooks data or just query it when we open a dashboard?

Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule — journal entries, invoices, bills, vendor payments, balance sheet items, and more. That means your workpaper dashboard reflects a recent snapshot, not a live query that times out when QuickBooks is slow. One honest caveat: QuickBooks report views like the built-in P&L and Transaction List are temporarily unavailable due to an upstream connector issue, but entity-level data — which is what you need for workpapers — syncs normally.

Our LP commitment data lives in our fund admin's portal, not in QuickBooks or Plaid. Can Starch reach it?

If your fund admin has a web portal you can log into, Starch can automate it through your browser — no API needed. You tell Starch where to navigate and what to pull, and it handles the session. This works for Intralinks, DocSend, and most fund admin portals. It's not a formal integration with a typed schema, but for pulling a capital account summary table or a commitment schedule, it does the job.

Will our auditors accept workpapers generated this way, or will they want the raw QuickBooks exports?

Starch surfaces your data — it doesn't transform it in ways that would concern an auditor. You can export any table or reconciliation view and attach it to your PBC package. The source is still QuickBooks or Plaid; Starch is just the surface you built on top. If your auditors want the underlying trial balance export from QuickBooks directly, you can provide that too — Starch doesn't replace the source system.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? Our auditors will ask about data security.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your fund's data security policy requires SOC 2 Type II for any tool that touches financial data, that's a real constraint to flag. It's worth raising with your compliance counsel before connecting QuickBooks or Plaid.

We use NetSuite, not QuickBooks. Does Starch work with that?

Yes — Starch syncs your NetSuite data on a schedule, including invoices, expenses, journal entries, balance sheets, and income statements. The Investor Reporting app in the App Store is built to work with NetSuite, so it's a reasonable starting point before you customize it into a workpaper dashboard.

The Contract Lifecycle Management app was listed as relevant to our team. Can we use it for audit-related contracts today?

Contract Lifecycle Management is coming soon — it's currently in development. You can request beta access to get notified when it launches. For now, if you need to track audit engagement letters or fund admin contracts, you can build a lightweight contract tracker as a custom app: tell Starch 'Build me an app that tracks our audit and service provider contracts with counterparty name, contract value, renewal date, and a file attachment field,' and it will build that surface for you today.