Investor Relations

How to run an investor data room as Asset Management Founders

Investor RelationsFor Asset Management Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You're running a $50M emerging fund with two people. Every quarter, you're manually pulling bank statements from Plaid, copying Stripe revenue data into a spreadsheet, reconciling QuickBooks entries, and stitching it all into a Notion page or a PowerPoint deck that looks slightly different every time. Your LPs expect Juniper Square–quality reporting; you're producing it with a pivot table and two hours of Sunday afternoon. You don't have a CFO or an analyst. You have a data room that lives in a Google Drive folder your lawyer set up in 2023 and hasn't been touched since. One LP asked for your NAV bridge last week and you spent forty minutes finding the right version of the file.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Investor RelationsFor Asset Management Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live investor data room that pulls your financials, fund metrics, and portfolio data automatically — so every LP sees current numbers, not last quarter's PDF

A CRM that tracks every LP relationship by commitment size, communication cadence, and follow-up status, with email threads surfaced directly from Gmail

A searchable document repository where your PPM, audited financials, side letters, and quarterly letters all live in one place — findable in seconds, not forty minutes

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 CRM Knowledge Management

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Plaid transaction and balance data on a schedule, syncs Stripe charges and payouts on a schedule, and syncs QuickBooks invoices, bills, payments, and journal entries on a schedule — these power the Investor Reporting app. The CRM connects to Gmail through Starch's scheduled sync so LP email threads surface automatically. Notion connects through Starch's scheduled sync to pull any existing fund documents into the Knowledge Management app. For any LP portal, data room hosting platform, or fund administrator portal that doesn't have a direct API, Starch automates it through your browser — no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Build me an investor reporting dashboard that pulls fund-level cash flow from Plaid, subscription and management fee revenue from Stripe, and entity-level expenses from QuickBooks. Show monthly burn, total capital deployed, remaining dry powder, and a portfolio company breakdown by investment date and current valuation. Format it so I can share a read-only link with LPs each quarter.

Build me a CRM for LP relationship management. Fields I need: LP name, entity type (individual / family office / institutional), total commitment, called capital to date, last communication date, preferred contact (email or phone), and any open asks or follow-ups. Pull in Gmail thread history so I can see our last email exchange without leaving the CRM.

Set up a knowledge base for my fund's investor data room documents. I want to store our PPM, LPA, audited financials by year, quarterly letters, capital account statements, and side letters. Make everything full-text searchable and flag any document that hasn't been updated in more than 90 days.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Plaid, Stripe, and QuickBooks to Starch — all three sync automatically on a schedule, so your fund's cash position, revenue, and expense data refresh without you touching anything.

2 Open the Investor Reporting starter app from the App Store. It comes pre-wired for Plaid and Stripe; add your QuickBooks connection and tell Starch which entities map to your fund vs. your management company.

3 Describe your fund-specific metrics to Starch in plain language: 'I need to show total commitments, called capital, uncalled capital, MOIC by portfolio company, and gross IRR since inception. Pull the raw numbers from QuickBooks journal entries and Plaid balances.' Starch builds the view.

4 Set up the LP CRM using the CRM starter app. Describe your LP tracking fields — commitment size, distribution history, side letter flags, preferred communication channel — and Starch builds the schema. Import your existing LP list from a spreadsheet if you have one.

5 Connect Gmail through Starch's scheduled sync. The CRM will surface email thread history for each LP contact so you can see the last time you spoke, what was discussed, and any open items — without switching between tools.

6 Set up the Knowledge Management app and upload or link your core fund documents: PPM, LPA, audited financials, quarterly letters, capital account statements. Starch indexes everything so any document is full-text searchable.

7 Tell Starch to flag stale documents: 'Alert me when any document in the data room hasn't been updated in 90 days, or when a quarterly letter is missing for the current quarter.' Starch sets the alerts.

8 Configure a quarterly automation: 'On the first Monday of each quarter, pull the latest Plaid balances, Stripe revenue, and QuickBooks expense entries, generate a draft quarterly letter using my prior quarter's letter as a template, and save it to the knowledge base as a draft for my review.'

9 For LP-specific data rooms hosted on platforms like Passthrough, Anduin, or your fund administrator's portal — if they don't expose an API — Starch automates the upload through your browser. Describe the workflow once; Starch handles the clicking.

10 Share a read-only link to the Investor Reporting dashboard with LPs who want live access between quarterly letters. Update permissions per LP based on their information rights in the LPA.

11 Use the CRM to run a monthly check: 'Which LPs haven't I emailed in more than 45 days?' Get a real answer and draft follow-up emails from within the same app.

12 At each quarter-end close, run the full package: updated dashboard, finalized quarterly letter in the knowledge base, capital account statements filed in the data room, and a CRM note logged for each LP contact you sent it to.

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

Q1 2026 LP reporting close — $47M AUM emerging credit fund

Sample numbers from a real run

Total commitments	47,000,000
Called capital (cumulative)	31,200,000
Uncalled capital remaining	15,800,000
Management fees billed (Q1)	117,500
Fund expenses (Q1, from QuickBooks)	43,200
Net cash position (Plaid, as of March 31)	2,840,000
Portfolio companies tracked in CRM	14
LPs in CRM	22

It's April 3rd. In prior years, this week meant manually downloading March bank statements from Plaid's portal, copying Stripe management fee invoices into a spreadsheet, exporting QuickBooks journal entries, and spending three hours building a table in PowerPoint. This quarter, Starch had already synced all three sources by the time you opened your laptop. The Investor Reporting dashboard showed $31.2M called against $47M total commitments, a net cash position of $2.84M, and Q1 fund expenses of $43,200 broken down by vendor — all current as of March 31. You typed: 'Draft my Q1 2026 quarterly letter using last quarter's letter as the format. Use the current Plaid balance, Stripe revenue, and QuickBooks expense data. Note that we closed two new portfolio positions in February.' Starch produced a draft in two minutes. You edited two paragraphs, saved it to the knowledge base, and it was immediately available in the LP data room alongside the audited 2025 financials and the updated capital account statements. All 22 LPs were logged in the CRM with their last contact date. Six hadn't received a direct email since the Q4 letter — Starch surfaced that list without you asking. You sent personalized follow-ups to each one before noon.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Called capital as a percentage of total commitments (capital deployment pace)

Days to close quarterly LP reporting package (target: under 5 business days from quarter-end)

LP contact recency — percentage of LPs contacted in the last 45 days

NAV per unit, updated monthly from Plaid and QuickBooks data

Document freshness — percentage of data room documents updated within the current quarter

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Juniper Square

Built for mid-to-large fund managers with dedicated ops teams; starts at $25k–$50k/year and requires a multi-week onboarding implementation that an emerging manager doesn't have time or staff for.

Addepar

Excellent for complex multi-asset portfolio analytics, but priced for RIAs and family offices managing $500M+; not a realistic option for a $50M emerging fund.

Google Drive + Notion + HubSpot (assembled stack)

Most emerging fund managers already run this stack — it works until Q7 or Q8 when the version-control chaos, manual reconciliation, and context-switching cost more time than you have.

iLevel (Blackstone's portfolio monitoring tool)

Institutional-grade portfolio monitoring but requires dedicated data entry staff and enterprise contract; overkill for a sub-$100M fund without a back office.

Visible.vc

Good LP update tooling for early-stage fund managers, but limited financial data integration — you still have to pull numbers manually from your accounting system and paste them in.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — investor reporting, crm, 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

Is Starch SOC 2 Type II certified? My LPs may ask about data security before I share financial data through it.

Not yet — Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. If your LPA or LP information rights agreements require SOC 2 compliance for any system holding fund financial data, that's worth flagging. For most emerging fund managers whose LPs are individuals and family offices, this hasn't been a blocker — but it's an honest limit you should know upfront.

QuickBooks is how my fund administrator sends me financials. How deeply does Starch integrate with it?

Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule, pulling 20+ entity types: invoices, bills, payments, vendors, journal entries, and more. One thing to know: QuickBooks report views — the pre-built P&L, Transaction List, and Vendor Expenses reports — are temporarily unavailable due to an upstream fix in progress. Entity-level data syncs normally, so your journal entries, bills, and vendor records are all accessible. For most fund-level reporting use cases, the entity data is what you actually need anyway.

My fund administrator uses a portal that doesn't have an API. Can Starch still interact with it?

Yes. If your fund administrator's portal is web-based — meaning you can log in and click through it in a browser — Starch can automate it through browser automation. No API needed. You'd describe what you want done: 'Log into the administrator portal, download the capital account statement for each LP, and save them to the data room.' Starch handles the navigation. This is how Starch works with any platform that doesn't have a direct integration.

Can I give individual LPs access to only their own data — not the full fund dashboard?

You can share read-only links to specific dashboard views or documents in the knowledge base. Granular per-LP permissioning — where LP A sees only their capital account and LP B sees a different subset — is something you'd configure in the app you build. Describe what access each LP type should have and Starch structures it accordingly. If you have complex information rights tiers across your LP base, it's worth describing those tiers explicitly when you set up the data room.

The Contract Lifecycle Management app looks relevant for tracking side letters and subscription agreements. Is that available?

Contract Lifecycle Management is currently in development — it's coming soon, and you can request beta access to get notified when it launches. In the meantime, the Knowledge Management app handles document storage, full-text search, and staleness alerts for your side letters, subscription agreements, and LPA. It won't do automated renewal tracking or e-signature workflows yet, but it keeps everything findable and organized while CLM is in development.

I don't have time to build this from scratch. How long does it actually take to get a working investor data room running?

The Investor Reporting app is a live starter template — you connect Plaid, Stripe, and QuickBooks (all scheduled-sync providers), and you have a working financial dashboard within the same session. Customizing it to your fund's specific metrics — deployment pace, MOIC by portfolio company, NAV per unit — means describing those fields to Starch in plain language. The CRM and Knowledge Management apps follow the same pattern. Most emerging fund managers get a working data room in an afternoon, not a week.