Strategy & Planning

How to run annual planning as Asset Management Founders

Strategy & PlanningFor Asset Management Founders5 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Annual planning for an emerging fund manager means reconciling what you told LPs you'd do with what actually happened, then building next year's budget, deployment targets, and hiring plan from scratch — usually in a tangle of Excel files, a Notion doc nobody has updated since Q2, and whatever you can remember from LP calls you didn't fully document. You don't have an analyst to build the model or an EA to chase down meeting notes. The large-fund software (Juniper Square, Addepar) costs more than your fund admin budget. So planning season means two weeks of nights and weekends pulling numbers from QuickBooks, Plaid, and Stripe into a spreadsheet, building scenarios manually, and then formatting everything into a slide deck before your January LP update.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Strategy & PlanningFor Asset Management Founders5 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A financial baseline that pulls your actual 2025 revenue, expenses, and runway from connected accounting data — no manual re-entry — feeding directly into side-by-side deployment and burn scenarios for the year ahead

A structured annual planning document in your Knowledge Management workspace that captures decisions, assumptions, and commitments from every planning meeting in one searchable place your future self can actually find

A presentation-ready LP annual update deck generated from your planning outputs, with real numbers, that you can iterate on without touching a slide template

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

Scenario Analysis Budgeting Knowledge Management Meeting Notes Presentation Agent

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Plaid transaction and balance data on a schedule (management fee inflows, operating account burn) and syncs your Stripe data on a schedule (any subscription or recurring revenue from fund SPVs). QuickBooks entity-level data — invoices, bills, vendors, journal entries — syncs on a schedule for the budget comparison. Notion connects through Starch's integration catalog so the agent queries your existing docs live when building the Knowledge Management workspace. Google Calendar syncs on a schedule to feed meeting context into Meeting Notes. Any LP portal or fund admin site without a direct API (e.g., your fund admin's reporting portal) is reachable through browser automation — no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Build me a scenario analysis for 2026 with three cases: base plan (10 new investments at $250k average check), conservative (6 investments, 20% slower deployment), and aggressive (14 investments, add one junior hire at $120k). Use my actual Plaid and Stripe data as the baseline and show runway, management fee coverage, and break-even in each case.

Set up a 2026 budget with categories for management fees received, fund expenses (legal, admin, software), and GP carry distributions. Pull 2025 actuals from my connected QuickBooks data and show me where I was over or under plan.

Create a 2026 Annual Plan workspace in Knowledge Management. Include sections for: investment thesis updates, portfolio company targets, LP commitments, hiring plan, and key decisions made during planning. Auto-tag anything related to LP communications.

Summarize today's annual planning session. Extract decisions made, assumptions locked in, and open items that need follow-up before the LP update in January.

Build a 10-slide LP annual update deck. Slide 1: fund overview and 2025 highlights. Slides 2-4: portfolio performance with deployment stats. Slides 5-6: 2026 strategy and deployment plan. Slide 7: fund financials and runway. Slides 8-9: pipeline and market outlook. Slide 10: asks and next steps. Pull numbers from my scenario analysis where possible.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Plaid, Stripe, and QuickBooks so Starch is syncing your 2025 actuals on a schedule — transactions, balances, invoices, and expenses — before you build anything. This is the baseline every scenario and budget comparison runs on.

2 Open the Scenario Analysis app and describe your three planning cases: base deployment plan, conservative if LP re-ups slow, and aggressive if you close the next close faster than expected. Starch uses your live financial data as the starting point so you're not inventing a baseline.

3 Review the scenario outputs — runway by case, management fee coverage ratio, break-even month — and lock the base case assumptions. Note any cases where the aggressive scenario breaks fee coverage (common for sub-$50M funds).

4 Open the Budgeting app and tell Starch to set up a 2026 operating budget by category. Starch pulls your 2025 QuickBooks actuals to suggest category allocations — fund admin fees, legal, software, travel — so you're starting from what you actually spent, not a guess.

5 Create your Annual Plan workspace in Knowledge Management and describe the sections you need: thesis updates, deployment targets by quarter, LP commitment tracker, hiring plan, and open decisions. This becomes the single doc that survives planning season instead of a folder of drafts.

6 Run every planning session — co-founder discussions, advisor calls, LP check-ins — with Meeting Notes active. After each call, Starch generates a summary with decisions, assumptions, and action items that auto-archive into the planning workspace.

7 Use the Knowledge Management search to surface decisions from November and December calls when you're writing the January LP update — so you're not trying to reconstruct what you committed to from memory or scrolling through Gmail.

8 When the financial model and decisions are locked, describe your LP annual update deck to the Presentation Agent: fund performance, 2026 strategy, deployment scenarios, and any asks. Starch assembles the slides; you edit the narrative and check the numbers rather than building from a blank deck.

9 Export the deck to PDF for LP distribution. If you use a fund admin portal to distribute materials, Starch can automate the upload through your browser — no API needed.

10 After the LP update goes out, use Starch to set a quarterly budget pace check: tell it to compare actual spend against your 2026 budget monthly and Slack you a variance summary the first Monday of each month so you catch overruns before they become Q4 surprises.

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

January 2026 Annual Plan — $35M Emerging Fund, Vintage 2024

Sample numbers from a real run

2025 management fees received (1.5% on $35M)	525,000
2025 fund operating expenses (legal, admin, software, travel)	312,000
2025 net GP surplus	213,000
2026 base case deployment target (10 investments × $250k)	2,500,000
2026 projected management fees (same fee basis)	525,000
2026 budget — fund ops (11% increase for one hire)	347,000
2026 projected GP surplus (base case)	178,000

It's the second week of January 2026. You have an LP update call on the 20th and you need to show 2025 performance, 2026 strategy, and your deployment plan. In previous years this took two full weekends. This year, Starch has been syncing your Plaid operating account and QuickBooks expenses all year, so the 2025 actuals — $525k in management fees received, $312k in fund operating costs, net surplus of $213k — are already in the system. You open Scenario Analysis and describe three cases for 2026. The base case assumes 10 new investments at a $250k average check and a $347k operating budget reflecting a part-time analyst hire at $85k. Starch shows management fee coverage at 1.5x in the base case, dropping to 0.9x in the conservative case (6 investments, slower deployment from a second close that slips to Q3). That coverage ratio is the number that actually matters for your fund economics, and seeing it break below 1.0x in the conservative scenario tells you to keep the analyst hire contingent on closing the second close first. You lock the base case, pull the budget comparison to confirm you were $38k under plan on travel (COVID hangover from fewer in-person LP meetings), and reallocate that to legal for two anticipated portfolio company follow-ons. Meeting Notes captured every planning discussion since November, so the Knowledge Management workspace surfaces the October LP call where one LP mentioned interest in co-invest rights — a commitment you almost forgot to include in the update deck. The Presentation Agent builds the 10-slide LP update from your description in about four minutes. You edit three slides, check the runway chart numbers, and send the PDF. Total time from 'open laptop' to 'deck out the door': six hours across two days, not two weekends.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Management fee coverage ratio (fees received vs. fund operating expenses, by scenario)

Deployment pace vs. plan (capital deployed YTD as % of target deployment for the vintage)

Net GP surplus / deficit (management fees minus all fund-level operating costs)

Runway on GP operating account (months until GP entity is cash-flow negative without new management fees)

LP re-up commitment rate (% of existing LPs committed to next close or follow-on fund)

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 reporting but starts at $50k+/year and assumes you have a dedicated ops person to maintain it — not practical for a sub-$100M emerging manager doing everything themselves.

Excel + Google Slides

Free and flexible, but every scenario is a manual rebuild, the model breaks when actuals change, and the deck takes a full weekend — which is exactly the time you're losing right now.

Visible.vc

Good for LP data rooms and update distribution, but it's a reporting output tool, not a planning and modeling tool — you still need to build the scenarios somewhere else before you can publish them.

Notion + Airtable stack

Covers knowledge management and lightweight tracking well, but you're manually copying numbers between tools and there's no financial modeling or scenario analysis built in.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — scenario planning, quarterly budgeting, 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 connect to QuickBooks for the budget comparison, or do I have to export a CSV?

Starch syncs your QuickBooks entity-level data on a schedule — invoices, bills, vendor payments, journal entries — so there's no CSV export. Note: the QuickBooks report views (P&L summary, Transaction List) are temporarily unavailable due to an upstream issue, but the underlying entity data syncs normally and Starch can build the budget comparison from that.

I use a fund administrator's portal to distribute LP reports. Can Starch upload to it?

If your fund admin has a web portal you can log into and click through, Starch can automate the upload through your browser — no API needed. This is the same way Starch handles any website that doesn't have a formal API.

What if my LP relationship notes are scattered across Gmail threads and a half-built Notion doc?

Starch syncs your Gmail messages on a schedule and connects to Notion from its integration catalog so the agent can query your existing docs live. The Knowledge Management workspace can pull context from both when you're building the annual plan — you describe what you want surfaced and Starch finds it.

Is this SOC 2 certified? Some LPs ask about data security for fund financials.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified yet. If an LP or their compliance team requires SOC 2 certification before you connect fund financial data, that's a real constraint to be aware of. It's on the roadmap.

The Budgeting and Presentation Agent apps are listed as 'coming soon' — can I use them now?

Budgeting and Presentation Agent are currently in development. You can request beta access to get notified when they launch. In the meantime, Scenario Analysis (live today) covers the financial modeling and scenario comparison work, and you can describe a custom planning dashboard to Starch that pulls from your connected Plaid and QuickBooks data.

How is this different from just doing the annual plan in a spreadsheet like I've always done?

The spreadsheet breaks every time an actual changes — you have to re-enter numbers, re-check formulas, and rebuild the scenarios manually. Starch keeps the model connected to live data from Plaid, Stripe, and QuickBooks, so when Q4 actuals close the scenarios update. The bigger difference is that planning isn't just modeling — it's also the meeting notes, the decisions you committed to, and the LP deck. Starch is the one place all of that lives together instead of across four different tools you're manually syncing.