Investor Relations

How to run an investor data room as Small Investor Relations Teams

Investor RelationsFor Small Investor Relations Teams3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Your two-person IR team is the bottleneck for every capital call notice, every LP data request, and every board KPI refresh. You're manually exporting QuickBooks reports, copy-pasting Plaid transaction data into Excel, and reformatting the same five tables for the quarterly LP letter at 11pm before the deadline. Your data room in DocSend or Intralinks is perpetually one version behind. LPs email asking for commitment pacing or J-curve figures and you spend an hour hunting through three systems to answer a question that should take five minutes. The institutional IR platforms — Juniper Square, Addepar, iLevel — would solve some of this, but at $50k+ per year they assume a dedicated IR-ops analyst you don't have.

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Investor RelationsFor Small Investor Relations Teams3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live investor data room dashboard that pulls from QuickBooks, Stripe, and Plaid on a schedule — so capital account balances, distributions, and cash positions are always current without a manual export

An LP communication hub that drafts quarterly letters and capital call notices from your live data, tracks which investors have opened and responded, and logs every interaction against their contact record

A commitment and pacing tracker custom-built for your fund's structure — vintage year, called capital, remaining commitment, IRR, and TVPI — described in plain language and built by Starch without an analyst or a six-figure platform

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 Contract Lifecycle Management

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule (invoices, payments, journal entries, income statements), syncs Plaid transactions and balances on a schedule, and syncs Stripe charges and payouts on a schedule. Gmail is synced on a schedule for email thread history. LinkedIn enrichment runs through browser automation — no LinkedIn API needed. DocSend and Intralinks data room access logs are pulled through browser automation. Contract Lifecycle Management (coming soon) will handle subscription agreements and side letters; in the interim, Starch can automate document retrieval from your existing DocSend or Google Drive folder through browser automation or Starch's integration catalog.

Prompts to copy

Build me an investor data room dashboard that shows each LP's committed capital, called capital to date, remaining commitment, and latest distribution. Pull cash movements from Plaid and Stripe, income statement figures from QuickBooks, and flag any LP whose called percentage crossed a new 25% threshold this quarter.

Create an LP CRM that tracks contact name, firm, commitment size, wire instructions status, last communication date, and whether they've opened the current data room. Pull email thread history from Gmail and enrich LinkedIn profiles automatically. Alert me when I haven't been in contact with an LP for more than 45 days.

Build a capital call tracker that shows each LP's pro-rata share of the current call, the due date, received status, and any wiring delays. Auto-draft the capital call notice for each LP using their commitment amount and the call percentage, and queue them for my review before sending.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect QuickBooks and NetSuite in Starch — both sync on a schedule, giving you capital account balances, journal entries, and income statements without a manual export. If your fund admin uses a different system, Starch can automate data retrieval through browser automation.

2 Connect Plaid and Stripe so cash movements — LP wire receipts, distribution payments, management fee deposits — sync automatically. Every transaction is categorized and available to any app or dashboard you build.

3 Start from the Investor Reporting app in the Starch App Store, then customize it to your fund's schema: add vintage year, called capital percentage, TVPI, DPI, and RVPI fields. Describe what you want and Starch rebuilds the schema around your reporting structure, not a generic template.

4 Build your commitment pacing tracker by telling Starch your LP roster, commitment sizes, and the call schedule. Starch cross-references actual wire receipts from Plaid against the expected call amounts and flags discrepancies before they become problems.

5 Set up the LP CRM using the Starch CRM app as a starting point. Import your existing contact list from Gmail or a spreadsheet, describe the fields that matter to you (commitment size, wire instructions status, LPAC membership, side letter flags), and Starch builds the schema. LinkedIn enrichment runs through browser automation to keep firm affiliations and contact details current.

6 Connect Gmail so every LP email thread — capital call acknowledgments, distribution questions, amendment requests — is logged automatically against the right contact record. You can ask 'which LPs haven't confirmed receipt of the Q4 capital call?' and get a real list.

7 Build a quarterly LP letter generator: tell Starch the sections you need (fund performance summary, portfolio company updates, capital account statement per LP), and it drafts each letter by pulling live data from your synced sources. You review and edit; Starch handles the data assembly.

8 Automate data room refresh: Starch pulls your latest financials from QuickBooks and Plaid, formats them to match your DocSend folder structure, and alerts you when documents need to be re-uploaded. Browser automation handles the actual DocSend upload if the platform doesn't expose an API.

9 Set up a capital call notice automation that fires on a schedule you define. Starch calculates each LP's pro-rata call amount, drafts the notice using your standard template, queues all notices for your review, and sends via Gmail once you approve — logging each send in the CRM automatically.

10 Build a J-curve and IRR dashboard that refreshes from your QuickBooks and Plaid data on a schedule. Describe the visualization you want — called capital vs. distributions over time, net IRR by vintage — and Starch builds the view. LPs asking J-curve questions get a link; you stop rebuilding the same chart quarterly.

11 Configure weekly digest automations: every Monday, Starch pulls any new LP activity from Gmail, flags overdue capital call responses, surfaces any data room document that's more than 90 days old, and Slacks you a summary so nothing falls through the cracks between your two desks.

12 Publish the investor-facing KPI dashboard as a read-only view for your CEO or GP. They get live figures without emailing you for a refresh; you stop losing afternoons to ad-hoc data pulls.

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 Letter and Capital Call — $180M fund, 34 LPs

Sample numbers from a real run

Total committed capital	180,000,000
Called capital to date (65.2%)	117,360,000
Q1 2026 capital call (8% of commitment)	14,400,000
Q1 distributions paid	3,100,000
LPs with open call balance (>5 days past due)	3
LP letters drafted and queued	34

It's March 28, 2026. Your Q1 close is in three days and you need to send 34 LP letters, a capital call notice for $14.4M (8% of commitment across all LPs), and refresh the data room with February financials. In previous quarters this took your team four days across two people. With Starch, the Investor Reporting app has already synced the February QuickBooks income statement and Plaid transaction data overnight. You open the LP letter generator, tell it 'draft Q1 letters for all 34 LPs, include each LP's capital account statement, fund-level net IRR of 18.4%, TVPI of 1.31x, and a two-sentence update on Portfolio Co #7's Series B,' and Starch produces 34 drafts in minutes — each with the correct individual capital account figures pulled from QuickBooks. The capital call automation calculates each LP's pro-rata share of the $14.4M call, drafts the notices, and queues all 34 for your review. You approve and send via Gmail; every send logs automatically in the CRM. Three LPs haven't confirmed receipt by day five — your weekly Slack digest flags them by name. You reply to each in under ten minutes. The data room refresh runs through browser automation: Starch uploads the updated financials to DocSend without you touching the portal. Total active time: under four hours, down from four days.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Called capital as a percentage of total commitment, by LP and fund-level

Days from capital call notice send to wire receipt, by LP (wiring lag)

LP letter turnaround time: days from quarter close to letter send

Data room document freshness: average age of documents in the active data room

LP response rate to capital call notices within 5 business days

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Juniper Square / Addepar / iLevel

Purpose-built for fund IR with deep LP portal features, but $50k+ per year, assumes a dedicated IR-ops analyst to configure and maintain, and still doesn't connect to your QuickBooks or Plaid without a separate integration project.

Excel + DocSend + Gmail (current state)

Zero cost and full control, but quarterly letters take four-person-days, data is always one export behind, and there's no audit trail when an LP disputes a capital account figure.

HubSpot CRM

Strong contact and email tracking, but not built for LP relationship data — commitment sizes, capital accounts, and fund-specific fields require significant custom configuration and an admin to maintain it.

Visible.vc / Passthrough

Good purpose-built LP reporting tools at a more accessible price point, but limited to their fixed reporting templates and don't connect to your QuickBooks, Plaid, or custom fund data without manual uploads.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — investor reporting, crm, 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 connect to Juniper Square or Addepar directly?

Both platforms are web-based, so Starch can automate data retrieval from them through browser automation — no API needed. If you can log in and navigate to a report, Starch can pull it. This isn't as deep as a native sync, so for real-time capital account ledgers, your fund admin's system of record stays the system of record; Starch surfaces the data you need without replacing it.

What happens when a QuickBooks P&L report needs to go into the LP letter?

Starch syncs your QuickBooks entity-level data — invoices, bills, payments, journal entries, vendors — on a schedule, and that data powers your dashboards and letter drafts. One honest note: QuickBooks report views (the formatted P&L, Transaction List, and Vendor Expenses reports) are temporarily unavailable due to an upstream connector issue we're working through. Entity-level data syncs normally, and Starch can reconstruct the same figures from underlying records.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? LP data is sensitive.

Not yet — Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. If your fund's compliance requirements or LP agreements mandate SOC 2, that's a real constraint worth naming. We're on the roadmap for certification. In the meantime, Starch doesn't store LP wire instructions or SSNs — that stays in your fund admin's system — and the data surfaces Starch builds pull from read-only synced sources.

Can Starch handle fund structures with side letters or different economics per LP?

Yes — describe your LP roster and the economics that vary (preferred return rates, management fee discounts, co-investment rights flags) and Starch builds the schema around your structure. The CRM can store side letter fields per LP contact, and the capital call automation can apply per-LP call percentages rather than a fund-level flat rate. Contract Lifecycle Management — coming soon — will eventually track the side letters themselves with expiration alerts and a searchable clause library.

We use Outlook, not Gmail. Does the LP communication tracking still work?

Yes. Starch syncs Outlook messages, events, calendars, and contacts on a schedule — the same way it handles Gmail. Your LP email threads log against the right CRM records, capital call responses are tracked, and the weekly digest pulls from Outlook data. The workflow is identical; just connect Outlook instead of Gmail during setup.

How does Starch handle historical data — we need J-curve charts going back to fund inception?

Starch is built for live data surfaces, not a long-horizon data warehouse. Your QuickBooks and Plaid syncs bring in historical records (QuickBooks entities go back as far as your account holds them; Plaid transaction history depends on your institution's availability), so a J-curve from fund inception is buildable if the underlying data is in those systems. If your older records live in a spreadsheet or a legacy platform, you can import that data into Starch to fill the history.