Strategy & Planning

How to run annual planning as DTC Brand Founders

Strategy & PlanningFor DTC Brand Founders4 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Annual planning for a DTC brand means pulling numbers from five places that have never spoken to each other. Your Shopify revenue lives in one tab, your Meta and Google ad spend in another, your Klaviyo email costs in a third, and your COGS estimates in a Google Sheet your ops person built six months ago. You spend two weekends in November reverse-engineering last year's numbers before you can even start thinking about next year. CAC by channel, contribution margin by SKU, inventory reorder points — none of it is in one place. By the time you've reconciled everything, you're presenting a plan that's already out of date.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Strategy & PlanningFor DTC Brand Founders4 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A living annual plan with your Shopify revenue, Plaid bank transactions, and ad spend all feeding the same model — so your assumptions update when your actuals do

A set of named scenarios (base, bear, aggressive growth) that show runway and break-even under each, built on your real Stripe and Plaid data rather than spreadsheet guesses

A board-ready presentation and a team wiki page that document the plan, the decisions behind it, and who owns what — so you're not rebuilding context every quarter

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 Stripe revenue and Plaid bank transactions on a schedule as the financial baseline for Scenario Analysis and Budgeting. Shopify is connected from Starch's integration catalog and the agent queries it live for order volume, AOV, and SKU-level revenue. Meta Ads and Google Ads are connected from Starch's integration catalog and queried live for spend and ROAS by campaign. Klaviyo is connected from Starch's integration catalog for email revenue attribution. Notion connects from Starch's integration catalog to pull any existing planning docs into the knowledge base.

Prompts to copy

Build a scenario analysis using my Stripe revenue data and Plaid transactions as the baseline. Create three scenarios: (1) base case with 30% YoY revenue growth and current ad spend ratio, (2) aggressive growth with 60% revenue growth and CAC increasing 20%, (3) conservative with 15% growth and a 10% reduction in paid spend. Show runway, burn rate, and break-even for each.

Create a 2026 annual budget with quarterly breakdowns for paid media, COGS, fulfillment, Klaviyo and other SaaS, headcount, and returns/refunds. Pull my actual 2025 spending from Plaid to seed the categories and suggest allocations based on that history.

Build a knowledge management page for our 2026 Annual Plan. Include our three planning scenarios, the assumptions behind each, channel-level CAC targets by quarter, inventory reorder thresholds for our top 5 SKUs, and who owns each workstream. Make it searchable by the team.

Build a 12-slide board presentation for our 2026 annual plan. Include: 2025 actuals vs plan, three 2026 scenarios with runway curves, channel-level CAC and ROAS targets, inventory strategy, headcount plan, and key risks. Use our actual revenue and burn numbers from the scenario model.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Plaid and Stripe as scheduled-sync sources — these become your financial baseline. Starch pulls your 2025 actuals automatically: revenue by month, bank outflows by category, net burn. You stop starting from a blank spreadsheet.

2 Connect Shopify from Starch's integration catalog. The agent queries it live to break down 2025 revenue by SKU, channel, and month so your plan reflects what actually sold, not a blended average.

3 Connect Meta Ads and Google Ads from Starch's integration catalog. Pull 2025 spend, CPM trends, and ROAS by campaign so your 2026 paid media budget is anchored to real channel economics, not gut feel.

4 Open the Scenario Analysis app. Your Stripe and Plaid data loads as the baseline. Build your three scenarios — base, bear, and aggressive — by adjusting only the assumptions you want to test: revenue growth rate, CAC by channel, headcount additions, and inventory holding costs.

5 For each scenario, Starch shows you runway, monthly burn rate, and the month you hit break-even. Drill into the aggressive growth scenario to see what CAC can climb to before it destroys margin — this is the number your media buyer needs before January.

6 Open the Budgeting app. Starch reads your 2025 Plaid transactions and suggests 2026 category allocations based on what you actually spent. Override the paid media line, the fulfillment estimate, and the returns reserve manually — those are the three lines DTC brands always get wrong.

7 Add your top 5 SKUs as a manual input layer. Set reorder thresholds and lead times for each. Starch ties these to your revenue scenarios so the aggressive growth plan automatically flags the inventory position you'd need to support 60% growth.

8 Open the Knowledge Management app. Create your 2026 Annual Plan page. Paste in the scenario outputs, the budget by category, channel CAC targets, SKU reorder thresholds, and the names of who owns paid, ops, and customer experience. This becomes the single doc the team references instead of the Slack thread from November.

9 Starch's Knowledge Management auto-categorizes the content and makes it searchable. When someone asks 'what's our Q2 Meta budget?' in three months, they find the answer without pinging you.

10 Open the Presentation Agent. Describe the board update you need: 12 slides covering 2025 actuals, the three 2026 scenarios with runway curves, channel KPI targets, inventory strategy, and key risks. Starch builds the deck; you spend your time adjusting the narrative, not fighting Google Slides.

11 Export the deck to PDF for the board meeting and a shareable link for async review. Archive it in the Knowledge Management app alongside the plan so future-you can find the reasoning behind the numbers.

12 Set a quarterly review cadence: Starch tracks actuals vs the annual budget automatically as Plaid and Stripe data syncs. Each quarter you open the plan, see where you're running hot or cold, and update the scenarios with one prompt instead of rebuilding the model.

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

November 2025 Annual Planning: Sunblend Skincare (fictional DTC brand, $4.2M run rate)

Sample numbers from a real run

2025 Shopify revenue (actuals)	4,200,000
2025 paid media spend (Meta + Google)	1,260,000
2025 blended CAC	38
2026 base case revenue target	5,460,000
2026 aggressive case revenue target	6,720,000
2026 paid media budget (base case)	1,540,000
Max sustainable CAC (aggressive scenario, 45% contribution margin)	51
Inventory reserve needed for aggressive case	380,000

The founder connects Plaid and Stripe, and Starch immediately surfaces 2025 actuals: $4.2M in Shopify revenue, $1.26M in paid media spend, and a blended CAC of $38 across Meta and Google. The Scenario Analysis app loads these as the baseline. She builds three scenarios. Base case: 30% revenue growth to $5.46M, holding CAC flat at $38, which requires $1.54M in paid media. Aggressive: 60% growth to $6.72M, CAC rising to $51 as she enters new audiences — Starch shows this still works at 45% contribution margin but requires an $380K inventory position to avoid stocking out on the hero SPF moisturizer. Bear case: 15% growth, cutting paid by $180K, runway extending to 22 months. The bear case is what she shows the board if Q1 ROAS degrades. She pins the aggressive CAC ceiling — $51 — in the Knowledge Management page as a standing guardrail for her media buyer. The Presentation Agent builds the board deck from the scenario outputs in about four minutes; she adjusts two slides and exports to PDF. Total time from 'I need to do annual planning' to 'the deck is done': one weekend afternoon instead of two.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

CAC by channel (Meta vs Google vs email) — tracked monthly against annual targets

Contribution margin by SKU — the number that tells you whether growth is actually profitable

Inventory turn rate and stockout risk for top 5 SKUs

ROAS by campaign cluster — the leading indicator for whether the paid media budget will hold

Runway in months under each scenario — the number the board actually cares about

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Sheets + manual data pulls

Free and flexible, but your actuals are always stale because pulling from Shopify, Meta, and Plaid manually takes hours — and one bad formula breaks the model two weeks into Q1.

Tableau or Looker Studio

Better visualization, but you still need to build and maintain the data connections yourself, and neither tool does scenario modeling or turns your plan into a board deck.

Jirav or Mosaic

Purpose-built financial planning tools with strong scenario modeling, but they're priced for Series B+ companies with a finance hire and don't touch your inventory, ad spend, or team wiki in the same place.

Notion + manual finance imports

Good for the documentation layer, but Notion can't pull your Plaid transactions, run scenarios, or build the presentation — you're still stitching four tools together.

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 Shopify directly?

Yes. You connect Shopify from Starch's integration catalog and the agent queries it live when your apps run — order volume, revenue by SKU, AOV, refunds. It's not a scheduled sync, so it reflects current data each time your app refreshes.

Can Starch pull my Meta and Google Ads spend into the plan?

Yes. Connect Meta Ads and Google Ads from Starch's integration catalog. The agent queries them live for spend, ROAS, and campaign-level data. You can build a budget tracker that compares planned vs actual paid spend by channel without exporting CSVs.

The Presentation Agent and Budgeting app say 'currently in development' — what does that mean for my annual planning?

Both are in development and not available today. You can request beta access to be notified when they launch. In the meantime, Scenario Analysis and Knowledge Management are live and handle the financial modeling and documentation layers of annual planning today.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I'm sharing revenue and bank data.

Not yet. Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified as of today. If that's a hard requirement for your company's data policy, it's worth knowing upfront. It's on the roadmap.

My financial data is in QuickBooks, not Plaid or Stripe. Does that work?

Yes. Starch syncs directly to QuickBooks on a schedule — invoices, bills, vendors, payments, and journal entries. One current limitation: QuickBooks report views like the P&L summary are temporarily unavailable while a connector fix is in progress, but the underlying entity-level data syncs normally and you can build your own views on top of it.

Can I use this for quarterly planning updates, not just the annual plan?

That's actually the better use case for most DTC operators. Build the annual plan once, then let Starch track actuals vs budget automatically as Plaid and Stripe data syncs. Each quarter you run a prompt like 'compare Q1 actuals to the base case scenario and flag where we're more than 15% off plan' — you get a variance analysis without rebuilding anything.

What about Klaviyo — can Starch pull email revenue attribution into the plan?

Yes. Connect Klaviyo from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live when your app needs it. You can include email-attributed revenue alongside paid channel data in your planning model.