Internal Comms & Meetings

How to run a monthly business review as Chief of Staff and Founder's Office

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Every month you're the one who actually assembles the business review — not the CFO, not the department heads, you. You chase HubSpot pipeline numbers from sales, pull QuickBooks P&L screenshots, ping engineering for headcount updates, and manually reconcile Slack threads from five functional leads into one coherent narrative. By the time you have a draft, the numbers are already a week old and you've burned two days you didn't have. The board deck gets done. The investor update gets sent. But nobody has a replicable process — it's all in your head and your inbox.

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Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live Monthly Business Review dashboard that pulls financial data from QuickBooks and Plaid, pipeline data from HubSpot, and headcount from Paylocity — all updated on a schedule, no manual export required

An automated MBR package that drafts the narrative, highlights variance from plan, and formats into a board-ready output using your Investor Reporting app as the financial backbone

A standing automation that pings department heads on a schedule, collects their updates via Slack or Gmail, and compiles everything into a single MBR doc before you even sit down to review it

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 Runway Analysis Scenario Analysis

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule (invoices, bills, payments, journal entries, vendors), your Plaid bank feeds on a schedule (transactions, balances, burn categorization), your Stripe data on a schedule (MRR, charges, subscriptions), your HubSpot data on a schedule (contacts, companies, deals, owners), and your Paylocity data on a schedule (employees, pay runs, headcount by team). Gmail and Slack are available to connect from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can query threads and channel messages live when assembling the narrative.

Prompts to copy

Build me a Monthly Business Review app that pulls HubSpot deal pipeline by stage, QuickBooks P&L by department, and Paylocity headcount by team. Show me actuals vs. last month and flag any line item that moved more than 15% in either direction.

Connect my Plaid and Stripe accounts and build a burn rate and runway section for the MBR — I want real net burn for the last 6 months, current runway, and a 12-month forward projection based on our current hiring plan.

Build me a scenario comparison for the MBR that shows three versions of Q3: base case (current hiring pace), conservative (freeze non-critical hires), and upside (close the two enterprise deals in HubSpot stage 5). Pull actual revenue and burn from Stripe and Plaid as the starting point.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect QuickBooks, Plaid, Stripe, HubSpot, and Paylocity — Starch syncs each on a schedule, so when you open the MBR app on the last Friday of the month, the data is already current.

2 Start with the Runway Analysis app to lock in the financial baseline: net burn for the trailing 6 months, current runway in months, and expense breakdown by category. This becomes the single number every functional update is measured against.

3 Open the Investor Reporting app and tell Starch what happened this period — top wins, key risks, one or two things that missed plan. Starch drafts the narrative layer around your live financials, matching the tone of your last update.

4 Tell Starch to build a pipeline section: pull HubSpot deals by stage, calculate weighted pipeline, and flag any deal that slipped stage or went dark since last MBR. This takes 30 seconds to describe; Starch queries HubSpot live and builds the view.

5 Add the headcount section by asking Starch to pull Paylocity employee data, group by department, and compare to the hiring plan you approved in Q2. Any team over or under headcount target gets flagged automatically.

6 If you're heading into a board meeting or a raise conversation, use Scenario Analysis to build the three-case model — base, conservative, upside — with your actual Stripe and Plaid numbers as the floor. Describe the assumptions you want to test and Starch runs the projections.

7 Set up an automation: on the 25th of each month, Starch sends a Slack message to each functional lead (engineering, sales, marketing, ops) asking for their three bullets — wins, misses, next-30-day priority. Responses come back to Starch, not to your inbox.

8 Starch compiles the functional lead responses alongside the financial data into a single MBR draft. You review one document, not six threads.

9 Review the variance flags Starch surfaced — any P&L line that moved more than 15%, any pipeline stage with unusual drop-off, any department over headcount budget. These are your talking points for the exec meeting, already identified.

10 Export or share the final MBR package. If you're using it as the investor update, the Investor Reporting app formats it for external distribution. If it's internal only, share the Starch app link with the exec team so they can drill into the underlying data themselves.

11 After the MBR meeting, log decisions and action items — tell Starch what was resolved and what's open, and it appends the record to the MBR so next month's review starts with last month's commitments already visible.

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

March 2026 MBR — 150-person growth-stage SaaS

Sample numbers from a real run

Net burn (March actuals, Plaid)	387,000
Runway at current burn (months)	14
MRR — Stripe	1,240,000
Weighted HubSpot pipeline (stage 3+)	4,100,000
Headcount (Paylocity actuals vs. plan)	148
Headcount plan for end of Q1	155

It's March 28th. In past years, the CoS would have spent Thursday and Friday pulling this together manually. This time, Starch had already synced QuickBooks, Plaid, Stripe, HubSpot, and Paylocity overnight. The Runway Analysis app showed net burn of $387K for March — up $22K from February, driven by a software vendor renewal that hit in mid-month (Plaid flagged it as a one-time spike, not a trend). Runway at current burn: 14 months. MRR from Stripe came in at $1.24M, up 6% month-over-month, slightly below the $1.28M plan. HubSpot pipeline query showed $4.1M weighted at stage 3 and above — but two enterprise deals that were stage 4 in February had slipped back to stage 3, which Starch flagged automatically as a variance item. Headcount from Paylocity: 148 actual vs. 155 plan, meaning engineering is 4 heads light and the CoS already knew the recruiting pipeline before the MBR meeting started. The Scenario Analysis showed that closing either of the two slipped enterprise deals before June would extend runway to 17 months and push break-even into Q1 2027. The CoS walked into the exec meeting with one doc, live numbers, and three specific talking points — all assembled in under two hours of actual work.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Net burn vs. plan (monthly actuals from Plaid, flagged against budget)

Runway in months (updated daily from Plaid + Stripe, not from a spreadsheet)

Weighted pipeline coverage ratio (HubSpot stage 3+ vs. revenue target)

Headcount actuals vs. hiring plan by department (Paylocity)

MBR package assembly time (hours from data pull to exec-ready doc)

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Slides + manual data pulls

You control every pixel, but someone — usually you — spends 4-6 hours every month pulling numbers from five systems and pasting them into a deck that's already out of date by the time it's shared.

Notion + manual department check-ins

Great for documentation and async input collection, but Notion doesn't query HubSpot, Plaid, or QuickBooks — you still have to bring the numbers in yourself, and there's no automated variance detection.

A BI tool (Looker, Metabase, or whatever the last analyst set up)

Can surface the financial and pipeline data if someone maintains the data models, but it doesn't write the narrative, ping functional leads, or combine financial and operational context into one package the CoS can actually present.

Workiva or Board (CFO-grade reporting platforms)

Purpose-built for board reporting at scale, but priced for enterprise finance teams, require dedicated admin to configure, and don't help with the operational coordination layer (functional lead inputs, headcount tracking, action item logging) that the CoS actually owns.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — investor reporting, runway analysis, scenario planning 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 actually have direct connections to QuickBooks, HubSpot, and Paylocity — or do I need to set up a separate integration tool?

Starch syncs your QuickBooks, HubSpot, and Paylocity data directly on a schedule — no separate integration tool required. QuickBooks syncs invoices, bills, payments, vendors, and journal entries. HubSpot syncs contacts, companies, deals, and owners. Paylocity syncs employees, payroll runs, and headcount. The data lives in Starch and refreshes automatically so your MBR numbers are current when you open the app.

What if I need QuickBooks P&L report views — the formatted income statement, not just raw transactions?

QuickBooks report views (P&L summary, Transaction List, Vendor Expenses) are temporarily unavailable while an upstream connector issue gets resolved. Entity-level data — invoices, bills, payments, vendors, journal entries — syncs normally, so Starch can reconstruct a functional P&L from those records. It's worth knowing upfront rather than discovering it mid-build.

Can I pull functional lead updates from Slack instead of email?

Yes. You can connect Slack from Starch's integration catalog and the agent queries it live when your automation runs. Tell Starch to post a structured prompt to each department lead's channel on the 25th of the month and collect responses. You can also use Gmail the same way — Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule and can send messages as part of an automation.

Will the MBR app replace my need for a separate investor update, or do I build those separately?

The Investor Reporting app overlaps significantly with the MBR financial layer — same Plaid, Stripe, and QuickBooks connections, same burn and runway data. Many CoS users build one connected dataset and author two surfaces from it: the internal MBR (operational detail, headcount, pipeline) and the external investor update (narrative, burn, MRR, key wins). You describe each to Starch separately and it builds both.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? Our board and some investors will ask.

Not yet — Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If that's a hard requirement from your investors or board before you connect financial data, it's an honest blocker worth knowing now.

How long does it actually take to set up the MBR workflow from scratch?

Connecting QuickBooks, Plaid, Stripe, HubSpot, and Paylocity takes 20-40 minutes depending on OAuth flows and permissions. Describing the MBR app to Starch and having it built takes another 30-60 minutes for a first version. The monthly cadence automation (Slack pings to functional leads, response collection, package assembly) is another 20-minute describe-and-build session. You're looking at a half-day of setup for a process that previously took two days every month.