Internal Comms & Meetings

How to run a monthly business review as CPG Founders

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor CPG Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Your monthly business review lives in six places: a Shopify export, a QuickBooks P&L you're waiting on your bookkeeper to close, a Plaid CSV you downloaded manually, a Google Slides deck you updated last month and half-updated this month, and two Slack threads where your co-founder flagged things you meant to write down. You spend two or three nights piecing it together, and by the time it's done the numbers are already two weeks stale. Nobody outside your company sees it, so the only person paying the cost of doing it badly is you — which means it's the first thing that gets skipped when production is on fire or a distributor is disputing a deduction.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor CPG Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live burn rate and runway dashboard that pulls from your Stripe revenue and Plaid bank feeds every day, so your cash position is never a number you have to go look up

An automated monthly investor update that drafts itself from your actual financial data, adds a narrative you review and edit, and sends to your investor list — so the update goes out even in bad months

A scenario model wired to your real baseline so you can answer 'what happens to runway if we launch a second SKU in Q3 and velocity is 20% below forecast' before you commit to the production run

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

Runway Analysis Investor Reporting Scenario Analysis

Data sources & config

Runway Analysis and Scenario Analysis connect to Stripe and Plaid as scheduled-sync providers — Starch syncs your transaction data and bank feed on a daily schedule so numbers are always current. Investor Reporting reads from the same Stripe and Plaid sync and also queries market context through browser automation — no API needed for competitive research. QuickBooks can be added as a scheduled-sync provider for entity-level data (invoices, bills, vendor payments) to round out the picture if your bookkeeper works in QB.

Prompts to copy

Build me a daily runway dashboard using my Plaid bank feed and Stripe revenue. Show net burn by month for the last 6 months, a 24-month forward projection at current burn, and a category breakdown of where cash is going — split between co-packer payments, freight, Amazon fees, and everything else.

Draft my March 2026 investor update. Pull burn rate and runway from my connected financials. Add a section on top wins this month, one risk I want to flag, and a 2-sentence competitive context paragraph on the better-for-you snack category. Keep the tone consistent with what I sent in February.

Build a side-by-side scenario model with three cases: (1) current plan, (2) we launch a second SKU in August and co-packer costs go up $18k/month starting July, (3) DTC revenue grows 15% slower than plan. Show runway, monthly burn, and break-even date for each.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Stripe as a scheduled-sync provider. Starch pulls charges, invoices, and subscription data on a daily schedule — your MRR and revenue trends are always live without a manual export.

2 Connect Plaid as a scheduled-sync provider. Starch syncs categorized transactions and balances from your business checking account, giving you real expense data instead of estimates. Tag your co-packer, freight, and Amazon fee categories so the breakdown is meaningful from day one.

3 Open the Runway Analysis app from the App Store and tell Starch how to categorize your CPG-specific expenses: 'Split COGS into co-packer, ingredients, and packaging. Separate Amazon fees and freight as their own lines. Everything else rolls up to OpEx.' Starch rebuilds the dashboard to match.

4 Open the Scenario Analysis app. Set your current plan as the baseline — Starch reads it from your live Stripe and Plaid data, so you're not entering numbers manually. Then describe the scenarios you actually care about: new SKU launch costs, a slower DTC ramp, a distributor paying net-90 instead of net-30.

5 Run your end-of-month review by opening Runway Analysis on the last day of the month. Confirm the burn number looks right, check whether any large one-time payments (co-packer true-ups, freight invoices) distort the monthly average, and flag anything unusual in the category breakdown.

6 Open Investor Reporting and answer the three questions Starch prompts you with: what was the biggest win this month, what's the biggest risk, and is there anything context-specific investors should know (a retailer conversation, an FDA comment, a new distributor signing). Starch drafts the full update from there.

7 Review the draft investor update. Check that the burn rate and runway figures match what you saw in Runway Analysis. Edit the narrative sections in your own words — Starch will remember the tone adjustments for next month.

8 Send the investor update from inside Starch. The email goes to your connected investor list; a copy archives automatically so you have a record of every update you've sent.

9 Run the scenario model any time a real decision comes up — not just at month-end. When your co-packer quotes you a new minimum run quantity, pull up Scenario Analysis and model the cash impact before you reply.

10 Before your next board call or investor check-in, pull the Runway Analysis trend view to confirm your narrative matches the actual numbers. If something has shifted since last month's update, note it explicitly — investors notice when the story and the data don't line up.

11 If your bookkeeper runs QuickBooks, add it as a scheduled-sync provider for entity-level data. Starch syncs invoices, bills, vendor payments, and journal entries so your MBR has accounting-grade data alongside the bank feed, without waiting for your bookkeeper to send you the P&L PDF.

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 — better-for-you granola brand, $180k MRR

Sample numbers from a real run

Stripe MRR (DTC + Amazon Seller Central)	180,000
Co-packer payments (March run)	54,000
Ingredients and packaging	22,000
Amazon fees (FBA + referral)	18,500
Freight (inbound to FBA + 3PL)	11,200
Payroll and contractors	34,000
All other OpEx	19,300
Net burn	-178,000
Cash on hand (Plaid balance)	1,420,000

In March, the brand ran $180k in revenue against $178k in total cash out — a net burn of roughly $2k, which is effectively breakeven but only because the co-packer invoice for the Q2 production run hadn't hit yet. Starch flagged this in Runway Analysis: the April projection shows a $68k spike in COGS when that invoice clears, which would push net burn to $70k for the month and drop runway from 8.0 months to 6.8. The investor update Starch drafted led with MRR growth (up 14% month-over-month, driven by a Whole Foods reset adding 180 new doors), flagged the April COGS spike as a known event rather than a surprise, and noted that the Scenario Analysis model showed runway stays above 6 months even if the new doors ramp 30% slower than the buyer's projection. The founder spent 25 minutes reviewing and editing the draft — the previous month, writing the update from scratch had taken most of a Sunday.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Net burn and runway in months — updated daily from Plaid, not monthly from the bookkeeper

Gross margin by channel (DTC vs. Amazon vs. wholesale) — critical because Amazon fees and distributor margins hit differently

COGS as a percentage of revenue — co-packer minimum runs and ingredient cost swings make this volatile month to month

Inventory days on hand — especially for perishable SKUs where overproduction means write-offs, not just carrying costs

Deduction rate from distributors — invalid deductions can quietly drain 3-5% of wholesale revenue if nobody's tracking them

Comparison

What this replaces

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

QuickBooks + a Google Slides template

QuickBooks gives you accounting-grade data but doesn't draft the narrative, build the charts, or send the update — you're still stitching three tools together and doing the writing yourself.

Fathom or Spotlight Reporting

Good at automated financial reporting if you're deep in QuickBooks, but they don't model scenarios from your actual live data or generate investor narrative — they produce reports, not decisions.

Notion + manual monthly update ritual

Works fine for capturing notes and decisions, but the financial data is whatever you copy-paste in — there's no live connection to Stripe or Plaid, so the numbers are only as current as the last time you updated them.

Hiring a fractional CFO

A good fractional CFO adds judgment you can't automate, but at $3-8k/month they're often doing tasks Starch handles automatically — pulling bank data, building the burn chart, drafting the investor email — which is expensive use of their time and yours.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — runway analysis, investor reporting, 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

My bookkeeper closes the books 3 weeks after month-end. Can Starch still do an MBR before that?

Yes — Starch reads directly from your Plaid bank feed and Stripe account, both synced on a schedule, so your burn and revenue numbers are available within a day of month-end without waiting for books to close. When QuickBooks does close, you can connect it as a scheduled-sync provider to pull entity-level data (bills, invoices, vendor payments) and reconcile against the bank feed view. The two sources complement each other rather than replacing one another.

Can Starch handle the fact that my revenue is split across DTC (Shopify), Amazon, and two wholesale distributors?

Starch syncs your Stripe data on a schedule, which covers DTC and any Stripe-billed channels. For Amazon Seller Central, connect it from Starch's integration catalog and the agent queries it live when your dashboard runs. For wholesale distributor invoices that aren't in Stripe, the cleanest path is connecting QuickBooks as a scheduled-sync provider so those invoices flow in from your accounting system. If a distributor portal has no API, Starch can pull data through browser automation — no API needed.

Will Starch store my bank transaction data? I'm not SOC 2 certified either and my investors are security-conscious.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified yet — that's worth knowing upfront. Plaid transactions and Stripe data sync into Starch's database as part of the scheduled-sync. If your investors or board require SOC 2 Type II on any tool that touches financial data, Starch isn't the right fit today. For most seed and Series A CPG founders this isn't a blocker, but it's worth flagging honestly.

The Investor Reporting app mentions sending to an investor list — does Starch manage the list, or do I have to set that up?

You set up the list once inside the app — paste in your investors' emails, add any preferences (some get the full update, some get a summary). After that, Starch sends on whatever cadence you set. Gmail is a scheduled-sync provider so the send comes through your actual Gmail account, not a generic noreply address. The current Gmail OAuth consent screen shows the underlying connector's name rather than Starch — that's a known limitation being addressed in a future update.

Can I use Scenario Analysis to model what happens if a major retailer gets delayed by a quarter?

Yes. Tell Starch: 'Build a scenario where the Whole Foods national rollout slips from Q3 to Q4, delaying $40k/month in expected wholesale revenue by three months. Show how that changes runway and whether we hit break-even before the delay revenue lands.' Starch reads your actual baseline from Stripe and Plaid, applies the adjustment you described, and shows the projected runway and burn side-by-side with your current plan. You can stack multiple assumptions — the retailer delay plus a co-packer price increase — in the same scenario.

What if I want to include operational metrics in the MBR — like units produced, fill rate, or deduction totals — not just financials?

Starch can pull operational data from any app in its integration catalog (queried live when your dashboard runs), and from any website through browser automation. If your co-packer sends you a portal login, Starch can pull production data from it through browser automation — no API needed. If your deduction tracking lives in a spreadsheet, connect Google Sheets from the integration catalog. Tell Starch: 'Add a section to my monthly review that shows units produced this month, fill rate by SKU, and total deduction dollars claimed by distributors.' Starch builds that section alongside the financial data.