Strategy & Planning

How to run annual planning as CPG Founders

Strategy & PlanningFor CPG Founders4 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Annual planning for a CPG brand means pulling numbers from six different places — Shopify, QuickBooks, your co-packer's production sheets, a Plaid-linked bank account, Amazon Seller Central, and whatever spreadsheet you built last year that nobody else understands. You spend two weekends in November building a plan that's already stale by February because your deduction disputes changed the net revenue picture and your Q4 inventory got caught in an FBA restock hold. There's no finance hire to own this. It's you, a spreadsheet, and a lot of guessing about whether your demand forecast and your cash runway are telling the same story.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Strategy & PlanningFor CPG Founders4 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A connected financial model where your actual Plaid transactions and Stripe revenue flow into your annual budget — so you're comparing plan vs. actuals automatically, not manually every quarter

A scenario library with at least three named plans (base case, conservative, stretch) that show runway, burn, and break-even given different assumptions on velocity, co-packer costs, and trade spend

A searchable annual planning wiki that captures every decision, assumption, and constraint from this year's planning cycle so next year doesn't start from scratch

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 Presentation Agent

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Plaid transaction and balance data on a schedule, and syncs your Stripe charges, invoices, and subscriptions on a schedule — both feed directly into the Scenario Analysis and Budgeting apps so your baseline is always live actuals, not last month's export. QuickBooks entity data (invoices, bills, payments, vendors) also syncs on a schedule for deeper cost-of-goods breakdowns. Shopify and Amazon Seller Central are reachable from Starch's integration catalog and queried live when your planning apps need velocity or channel revenue data. Notion syncs on a schedule if you keep planning docs there and want to pull them into your Knowledge Management wiki.

Prompts to copy

Connect my Plaid and Stripe accounts and build me a base-case financial model for 2026 with three scenarios: one assuming 20% revenue growth, one flat, and one where I delay a co-packer contract renewal by a quarter. Show runway and monthly burn for each.

Pull my actual spend from Plaid for Jan–Oct 2025 and auto-generate a 2026 budget with suggested allocations by category — COGS, trade spend, marketing, logistics, SG&A. Flag any category where I'm over 15% off historical run rate.

Create an annual planning wiki page that documents our 2026 demand assumptions, co-packer capacity constraints, key risks, and the decisions we made and why. Auto-categorize it under Strategy and link it to our scenario models.

Build me a 12-slide 2026 annual plan presentation for our board showing revenue targets, burn rate by quarter, top three strategic bets, and the scenario analysis — pull in the actual numbers from our Stripe and Plaid data.

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 actual revenue, transactions, and cost data on a schedule — this is your planning baseline, not a manual export.

2 Open Scenario Analysis and describe your base case: current revenue run rate from Stripe, burn from Plaid, and your best guess at 2026 COGS given your co-packer contract. Starch builds the model from your actual numbers.

3 Add a conservative scenario for each major risk — a velocity miss on a key SKU, a co-packer cost increase, a delayed retail door rollout — and name each one so you can reference them in board conversations.

4 Open Budgeting and ask Starch to generate a 2026 budget by pulling your Jan–Oct 2025 actuals from Plaid and QuickBooks. Review the suggested allocations and adjust trade spend, logistics, and marketing based on what you know is changing.

5 Set quarterly checkpoints inside Budgeting so you can see pace-vs-plan by category throughout the year — this is what replaces the 'check the spreadsheet' habit.

6 Open Knowledge Management and create your 2026 Annual Plan page: document the demand assumptions you're planning against (units by SKU, channel mix, seasonal peaks), your co-packer capacity ceiling, and any supply constraints you're aware of today.

7 Write down every decision made during planning and why — pricing assumptions, which SKUs you're prioritizing for launch, what you're cutting. This is the institutional memory that makes next November's planning cycle take days instead of weeks.

8 If you have a board, advisory board, or investor update coming, open Presentation Agent and describe what you need — 'a 12-slide 2026 annual plan for our seed investors showing revenue targets, burn by quarter, and scenario analysis.' Starch pulls the numbers from your connected data and builds the deck.

9 Share the scenario models with any co-founders or key operators and use the Knowledge Management wiki as the single source of truth — so when your ops lead asks 'are we planning for 30,000 or 35,000 units of the new SKU,' the answer isn't in someone's head.

10 At the end of Q1, pull Plaid and Stripe actuals back into Scenario Analysis and compare against your base case — decide whether to revise assumptions or stick to plan, and document that decision in the wiki so you have a clean audit trail of how your thinking evolved.

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

November 2025 Annual Plan — Ready-to-Drink Tea Brand, $2.1M TTM Revenue

Sample numbers from a real run

Gross Revenue (Stripe + Amazon)	2,100,000
COGS — Co-packer (per-unit contract + minimums)	840,000
Trade Spend — Distributor Deductions + Slotting	189,000
Logistics — 3PL + FBA Fulfillment	252,000
Marketing — Paid Social + Sampling Events	168,000
SG&A — Founder Salary + Part-time Ops	210,000
Net Operating Cash (before fundraise)	-559,000

This founder connected Plaid and Stripe and asked Starch to build a 2026 model with three scenarios. Base case assumed 28% revenue growth to $2.69M driven by expanding from two regional distributors to four, holding co-packer unit costs flat under a renewed contract, and keeping trade spend at 9% of gross. Conservative case held revenue flat at $2.1M and added a 7% co-packer cost increase the founder knew was possible — that scenario showed runway dropping from 14 months to 9, which immediately changed the fundraising conversation. The stretch case modeled a grocery chain pilot that would add $380K in H2 revenue but required $95K upfront in slotting fees. Starch flagged that the stretch case only improved runway by 2 months net because the slotting fees hit before the revenue did — something the founder hadn't modeled. The Budgeting app pulled the 2025 actuals from Plaid and QuickBooks and auto-suggested a trade spend allocation 12% higher than the founder had planned, based on the historical pattern from distributor deductions. That adjustment alone changed the break-even month from October to December 2026. All three scenario narratives, the demand assumptions by SKU, and the co-packer contract constraints were saved into the Knowledge Management wiki before the board call, so when an investor asked 'what's your assumption on unit economics at 40,000 cases,' the founder had the answer in under 30 seconds.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Cash runway in weeks (by scenario — base, conservative, stretch)

Gross margin by SKU after co-packer and 3PL costs

Trade spend as a percentage of gross revenue (target: under 10% for DTC-heavy brands, up to 15% for distributor-heavy)

Plan vs. actuals variance by quarter across COGS, logistics, and marketing

Break-even unit volume at current price point and contracted co-packer minimums

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Excel or Google Sheets

Free and fully flexible, but your scenarios disconnect from live data the moment you export — by February your annual plan is already a historical artifact, not a working model.

Mosaic or Runway (FP&A software)

Purpose-built for financial planning and genuinely good at it, but starts around $500–$1,000/month and is designed for teams with a finance hire to operate it — overkill if you're a two-person CPG team.

QuickBooks + manual exports

QuickBooks is already in your stack and the data is accurate, but it can't build forward-looking scenarios or compare multiple futures — it tells you what happened, not what happens if you delay the co-packer contract renewal.

Notion or Confluence for planning docs

Good for capturing decisions and building a wiki, but they don't connect to your financial data — your planning narrative and your actual numbers live in separate tools and drift apart over time.

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

My QuickBooks has all my financials. Can Starch actually read it, or do I have to export everything manually?

Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule — invoices, bills, payments, vendors, and journal entries sync automatically. One note: QuickBooks report views like P&L and Transaction List are temporarily unavailable due to an upstream fix in progress, but the underlying entity data that feeds your planning model syncs normally. For most annual planning use cases, the entity-level data is what you actually need.

I sell on Shopify and Amazon. Can Starch pull in my channel revenue for planning?

Yes. Shopify and Amazon are reachable from Starch's integration catalog — connect them and the agent queries your revenue and order data live when your planning apps need it. For Amazon Seller Central specifically, Starch also has a pre-built Amazon Seller Dashboard app you can start from.

Will my annual plan stay connected to actuals throughout the year, or is it a snapshot I have to update manually?

Your Plaid transactions and Stripe revenue sync on a schedule, so your Budgeting app compares plan vs. actuals automatically each time it refreshes. You're not re-importing CSVs every quarter — the live data flows in and the variance analysis updates. Scenario Analysis uses the same live baseline, so if your revenue trajectory shifts in Q2, you can re-run your scenarios against real numbers.

I'm not a finance person. Is building a scenario model in Starch going to require me to understand financial modeling?

You describe what you want in plain language — 'show me what happens to our runway if co-packer costs go up 8% and we grow revenue 15% instead of 25%' — and Starch builds the model. You adjust the assumptions, not the formulas. If you're starting the Scenario Analysis app for the first time, Starch connects to your Plaid and Stripe data and uses your actuals as the baseline automatically.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I'm going to be putting real financial data into this.

Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. If that's a hard requirement for your business, it's worth knowing upfront. Many early-stage CPG founders make the tradeoff given the alternatives — a spreadsheet on a personal Google Drive isn't more secure — but it's a real limitation and you should factor it in.

The Budgeting and Presentation Agent apps say 'currently in development.' Can I use them now?

Budgeting and Presentation Agent are in development — you can request beta access to get notified when they launch. Scenario Analysis and Knowledge Management are live today and can handle most of the heavy lifting for annual planning while you wait.