Strategy & Planning

How to run annual planning as Professional Services Founders

Strategy & PlanningFor Professional Services Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Annual planning at a 12-person consultancy is a two-week scramble that happens in December when everyone is already buried in year-end client deliverables. You pull last year's revenue out of Stripe, try to reconcile it against QuickBooks, argue with yourself about whether that one-off retainer counts as recurring, then paste it all into a Google Sheet that breaks when you share it. Capacity planning is a guess because utilization data lives in Harvest and nobody exported it. Headcount targets are based on vibes. The resulting 'plan' is a Notion doc nobody reads after January 15th. By March, you're flying blind again.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Strategy & PlanningFor Professional Services Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A connected financial baseline — Stripe revenue, Plaid cash, and QuickBooks actuals synced automatically into one place — so your plan starts with real numbers, not last year's export.

A live scenario model that shows what annual revenue, headcount, and runway look like if you raise rates 10%, add one senior hire, or lose your two biggest retainers — without rebuilding the spreadsheet every time.

A single planning document in Starch that links your targets to your live data, so you can check progress against the annual plan in February without another spreadsheet rodeo.

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

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Stripe revenue and Plaid cash on a schedule so scenario baselines reflect real numbers, not last month's export. Starch connects directly to QuickBooks for actuals across invoices, bills, and payroll entries — note that QuickBooks P&L report views are temporarily unavailable, but entity-level data syncs normally. Starch connects directly to Notion so existing strategy docs feed the knowledge base without re-entry. HubSpot pipeline data is queried live from Starch's integration catalog when you need forward revenue estimates layered into scenarios.

Prompts to copy

Build me a scenario model for our 2026 annual plan. Pull our actual 2025 revenue from Stripe and cash from Plaid as the baseline. I want to compare three scenarios: (1) flat growth with current headcount, (2) 15% revenue growth with one senior hire at $140k, and (3) losing our two largest retainers and cutting one contractor. Show runway, monthly burn, and break-even month for each.

Create a 2026 annual budget by department — delivery, sales, and G&A — using our 2025 QuickBooks actuals as the starting point. Auto-suggest allocations based on last year's spend pattern, flag any category where we were more than 15% over budget last year, and set up monthly pace tracking against each line.

Build a knowledge base section called '2026 Annual Plan' that stores our planning assumptions, scenario outputs, and headcount targets. Make it searchable, link it to our existing Notion pages for company strategy, and set a reminder to review assumptions quarterly.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Stripe, Plaid, and QuickBooks in Starch. Your 2025 revenue, cash position, and expense actuals sync automatically — this is the baseline everything else builds on.

2 Open the Scenario Analysis app and prompt Starch with your planning assumptions: current ARR from retainers, average project size, target utilization rate, and planned headcount changes. Starch pulls the live data and builds the baseline without you touching a formula.

3 Define your three or four planning scenarios — conservative (flat retainers), base (organic growth), aggressive (new practice line or senior hire), and downside (lose top client). Starch models each one against your actual burn rate.

4 Pull HubSpot pipeline into the base-case scenario. Connect HubSpot from Starch's integration catalog and ask Starch to layer weighted pipeline value into your revenue forecast for Q1 and Q2.

5 Review the scenario outputs: runway by scenario, break-even month, monthly burn delta vs. current. Flag the assumptions that move the needle most — usually billing rate, utilization, and one or two large retainers.

6 Open the Budgeting app and set annual targets by department — delivery labor, contractor spend, sales, software, G&A. Starch auto-suggests allocations from your QuickBooks actuals; adjust where your plan diverges from history.

7 Set pace indicators: for each budget category, define what 'on track' looks like at the end of Q1. Starch will compare actuals against those targets monthly and flag variance.

8 Capture your planning assumptions and decisions in the Knowledge Management app. Create a '2026 Annual Plan' section that stores the scenario you chose, the key assumptions behind it, and the headcount decisions you made — so in April, when a partner asks 'why did we budget for two new hires,' the answer is findable in thirty seconds instead of requiring a meeting.

9 Link the Knowledge Management entry to your existing Notion strategy docs. Starch connects directly to Notion so the annual plan sits alongside your existing content rather than in a separate silo.

10 Set a quarterly review automation: prompt Starch to compare YTD Stripe revenue and Plaid burn against the plan you chose, and surface a summary every quarter so you can reforecast before you're three months off-track.

11 Share the relevant scenario output with your partners or investors. Export the scenario comparison or use Starch to build a one-page summary dashboard — describe it in plain language and Starch assembles it from the connected data.

12 Archive the planning session — scenario model, budget, assumptions, decisions — so next December's annual planning starts with last year's plan as context instead of another blank spreadsheet.

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

Meridian Advisory Group — 2026 Annual Plan, December 2025

Sample numbers from a real run

2025 actual recurring retainer revenue (Stripe)	1,840,000
2025 actual project revenue (Stripe)	610,000
2025 total labor cost — employees + contractors (QuickBooks)	1,650,000
2025 software + tools (QuickBooks)	87,000
Base-case 2026 revenue target (15% growth)	2,818,500
Senior hire added to base case (fully loaded)	175,000
Downside case: lose two largest retainers (~$420k ARR)	2,030,000

Meridian is a 12-person management consultancy with eight retainer clients and a handful of project engagements each year. In December 2025, the founder connects Stripe and Plaid and runs the Scenario Analysis app for the first time. Starch pulls $2.45M in 2025 actual revenue — $1.84M retainer, $610k project — and $137k average monthly burn from Plaid. The base case adds one senior hire at $175k fully loaded and assumes 15% revenue growth, landing at $2.82M and 14 months of runway at the end of 2026. The downside scenario — losing the two biggest retainers, which together represent $420k ARR — drops revenue to $2.03M and runway to 7 months, which is the number that gets the founder's attention. The planning session that used to take two weeks of spreadsheet work takes one afternoon. The founder captures the decision to prioritize retainer retention over new business development in the Knowledge Management app under '2026 Annual Plan,' links it to the existing Notion page on client strategy, and sets a Q1 check-in to reforecast if either at-risk client shows signs of churn.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Retainer revenue as a percentage of total revenue (target: >65% to reduce project revenue volatility)

Billable utilization rate by headcount level — not just 'are people busy' but 'are they billing at the right rate for the right clients'

Runway in months at current burn — updated monthly from Plaid actuals, not quarterly from memory

Revenue per employee (total Stripe revenue divided by headcount including contractors) — the efficiency metric that matters when you're deciding whether to hire

Pipeline coverage ratio — weighted HubSpot pipeline value versus Q1 and Q2 revenue targets, so you know early whether you need to accelerate business development

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Kantata / Projector / Deltek

Built for 200-person firms with a dedicated ops team to implement them; pricing and implementation timelines are out of scope for a 12-person consultancy, and they require migrating your existing HubSpot and accounting stack into their data model.

Google Sheets annual plan + Stripe/QuickBooks exports

Free and familiar, but every scenario reforecast requires a manual export and a broken VLOOKUP — the plan stops being useful the moment something changes.

Mosaic or Jirav (standalone FP&A tools)

Strong scenario modeling, but they're an additional monthly subscription on top of your existing stack, require a finance-literate operator to set up, and don't connect your operational data (calendar utilization, pipeline) to the financial model.

Notion + manual budgeting

Good for storing decisions and assumptions, but Notion has no native connection to your Stripe or QuickBooks actuals, so the plan is always a static document rather than something you can check in February.

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

Can Starch pull the QuickBooks P&L I need for the baseline?

Starch syncs QuickBooks entity-level data — invoices, bills, payments, vendors, journal entries — on a schedule, and that's what the scenario and budgeting models are built on. One honest caveat: QuickBooks P&L and Transaction List report views are temporarily unavailable due to an upstream connector issue. For most annual planning purposes, the entity-level data gives you what you need; if your workflow depends specifically on the QuickBooks P&L report view, that's a known gap right now.

What if my pipeline lives in a Google Sheet instead of HubSpot?

Connect Google Sheets from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live when you need pipeline data in a scenario. Tell Starch: 'Pull the weighted pipeline values from my Q1 tab in this Google Sheet and layer them into the base-case revenue forecast.' It works — you don't need to migrate to HubSpot first.

Can Starch model utilization as part of the capacity plan?

Starch can pull calendar data — Starch connects directly to Google Calendar on a schedule — and build a utilization view from meeting and project time if you describe what you want. If your team logs time in Harvest or a similar tool, connect it from Starch's integration catalog and ask Starch to build a utilization dashboard against your headcount. Starch is not a purpose-built PSA, but for a 12-person firm, a custom dashboard built in natural language is usually enough.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? My retainer clients sometimes ask about data handling.

Not yet. Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. If a client contract requires SOC 2 certification from your tools, that's a real gap to know about. It's on the roadmap.

How do I make sure next year's plan doesn't just sit in Notion and get forgotten?

Set up a quarterly reforecast automation in Starch: describe it as 'every quarter, compare YTD Stripe revenue and Plaid cash burn against my 2026 plan targets and send me a summary in Slack.' Starch builds that automation against your live connected data. The plan stops being a static document and starts being something that tells you when you're drifting.

Can I use the Budgeting app for department-level tracking across the whole year, not just quarterly?

Yes. The Budgeting app supports annual budgets broken into monthly pace tracking — set it up for the full year and Starch monitors actuals against targets each month as QuickBooks syncs. Note that the Budgeting app is currently in development; you can request beta access to get notified when it's available.