Internal Comms & Meetings

How to run a monthly business review as DTC Brand Founders

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor DTC Brand Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Your monthly business review lives in six places at once. Shopify for orders and returns, Meta Ads Manager for spend, Klaviyo for email revenue, Plaid for cash, a Google Sheet your ops person built last year, and a Notion doc nobody updates. Pulling it together means exporting CSVs, re-keying numbers, and realizing at 11pm that your blended CAC calculation is wrong because you forgot to include TikTok spend. By the time you've got one clean slide, the data is three days old. You do this every month, it takes 4-6 hours, and the output still doesn't show the full picture because your ad spend still doesn't talk to your inventory position.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor DTC Brand Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live MBR dashboard that pulls Shopify orders, Meta and Google ad spend, Plaid bank transactions, and Klaviyo email revenue into one place — updated daily, no CSV exports required

An auto-drafted investor update and board narrative built from your actual numbers, with burn rate, CAC, ROAS, and runway calculated correctly before you write a single word

A scenario layer that shows what happens to your runway if Q4 inventory costs run 20% over or if your Meta CPMs spike — so you walk into the review already knowing the decisions you need to make

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

Starch syncs your Plaid bank transactions and Stripe revenue on a schedule — this powers the Runway Analysis and Investor Reporting templates directly. Shopify, Meta Ads, Klaviyo, and Google Ads connect from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries them live when your MBR dashboard or automations run. If you use any carrier portal or supplier site without an API, Starch automates it through your browser — no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Connect my Plaid bank account and Stripe revenue feed. Build me a monthly burn and runway dashboard that breaks expenses into ad spend, COGS, fulfillment, and payroll. Show me net burn for the last 6 months and a 12-month forward projection at my current run rate.

Every first Tuesday of the month, pull my Plaid and Stripe data, calculate net burn, MRR, and runway, then draft a 400-word investor update covering: cash position, revenue vs plan, top 3 wins, top 2 risks, and what I need from investors this month. Email it to my investor list when I approve it.

Using my current Plaid and Stripe baseline, build three scenarios: (1) Meta CPMs up 30% for 90 days, (2) I add one full-time hire at $90k fully loaded, (3) I delay my next inventory order by 45 days. Show runway and monthly burn for each.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Plaid and Stripe in Starch — both sync on a schedule, so your bank transactions and revenue data are always current without manual exports.

2 Connect Shopify, Meta Ads, Klaviyo, and Google Ads from Starch's integration catalog; these are queried live each time your MBR dashboard loads or an automation runs.

3 Start with the Runway Analysis template. Tell Starch how you categorize expenses — ad spend, COGS, fulfillment, payroll, SaaS — and it builds the P&L breakdown from your actual Plaid transactions.

4 Tell Starch to add a CAC calculation: 'Pull total Meta and Google ad spend from the last 30 days from my connected ad accounts and divide by new Shopify customers in the same period. Show it as a trend line over 6 months.'

5 Open the Scenario Analysis app. Set your current burn and revenue as the baseline (it pulls from Plaid and Stripe automatically), then add the scenarios that are actually keeping you up at night — inventory cost overrun, CPM spike, delayed fundraise.

6 Open the Investor Reporting app. Tell it your investor update cadence, the tone you want (direct, no spin), and what sections to include — cash, revenue, CAC, ROAS, wins, risks, asks.

7 Set the automation: 'On the first Tuesday of each month, draft my investor update using current Plaid and Stripe data, include blended CAC from Meta and Google Ads, and send it to my Slack for review before emailing my investor list.'

8 Walk through your first auto-draft. Correct any framing or context Starch missed, then tell it what to remember for next month — it carries your tone and preferences forward.

9 Build a secondary view for your team: 'Show weekly Shopify revenue, units sold, return rate, and Klaviyo attributed revenue in a single dashboard I can share with my ops lead.'

10 At your actual monthly review meeting, open the live dashboard instead of a deck. Every number is current as of today — no stale slides, no last-minute re-keying.

11 After the meeting, run a quick scenario: 'What does runway look like if I move forward with the Q3 reorder plan at current sell-through velocity?' Use it to make the inventory call on the spot instead of following up later.

12 Archive the month. Starch keeps the historical snapshots so your next MBR starts with a clear before/after comparison — no rebuilding context from old Slack messages.

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

March 2026 MBR — skincare DTC brand, 8 SKUs, $2.1M trailing revenue

Sample numbers from a real run

Shopify gross revenue (March)	187,000
Klaviyo attributed revenue	41,000
Meta Ads spend	38,500
Google Ads spend	9,200
Blended CAC (new customers: 1,140)	42
Fulfillment + COGS	71,000
Net burn (March)	31,000
Cash in bank (Plaid)	610,000
Runway at current burn	20

In March, Starch pulled $187k in Shopify gross revenue alongside $41k attributed to Klaviyo flows, giving a cleaner view of email's contribution than the founder had seen before — her previous sheet counted Klaviyo-assisted orders twice. Blended CAC came in at $42 across 1,140 new customers, but the Meta-only CAC was $51 versus $29 from Google — a split that had been invisible in her single-number CAC calculation. Net burn was $31k against a $40k budget, mostly because she delayed one hire. With $610k in the bank, runway is 20 months at this pace. The Investor Reporting app drafted the monthly update in 8 minutes: it flagged the CAC channel split as a top insight, noted the hire delay, and surfaced that Q2 inventory commitments (already booked at $95k) will push April burn to roughly $52k — dropping projected runway to 14 months if revenue stays flat. The scenario layer showed that a 15% revenue lift from Q2 promotional campaigns would hold runway above 16 months even with the inventory spend. The founder walked into her Monday investor call with that scenario already modeled, not working through it on the call.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Blended CAC by channel (Meta vs. Google vs. email) — not just total CAC

Net burn vs. budget, broken out by ad spend, COGS/fulfillment, and headcount

Cash runway in months at current burn rate, updated daily from Plaid

Shopify revenue vs. Klaviyo attributed revenue (to see email's real contribution)

Return rate by SKU (to catch inventory problems before they hit the P&L)

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Sheets + manual CSV exports

Free and familiar, but someone has to pull every export, and your numbers are stale the moment you close the tab — the MBR prep still takes a full afternoon every month.

Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio)

Good for read-only dashboards once a data engineer sets them up, but it won't draft your investor narrative, run scenarios, or send emails — you still need to move data and write the story yourself.

Triple Whale or Northbeam

Strong on ad attribution and blended ROAS, but they don't touch your bank account, your inventory position, or your investor update — you still need separate tools for the financial and reporting layers.

Notion + manual templates

Good for archiving past MBRs, but the numbers are only as accurate as whoever copied them in — and Notion won't auto-calculate CAC or draft the investor email for you.

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

Does Starch connect to Shopify and Meta Ads, or do I need to export CSVs?

No CSVs. Shopify and Meta Ads connect from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries them live when your dashboard loads or an automation runs. You connect them once and they stay connected. Plaid and Stripe sync on a schedule so your bank and revenue data are always current in the background.

My CAC calculation is complicated because I run Meta, Google, and TikTok. Can Starch handle that?

Yes. Meta Ads and Google Ads are in Starch's integration catalog and queried live. TikTok Ads is reachable through Starch's integration catalog as well. You tell Starch exactly how you want to define CAC — which spend to include, which Shopify customer cohort to use — and it calculates it your way, not a generic formula.

What if I'm not on Stripe? My revenue runs through Shopify Payments.

Shopify connects from Starch's integration catalog, so your Shopify Payments revenue is queryable there. For your bank-level cash position, Plaid covers the bank account directly regardless of which payment processor you use. The Runway Analysis template uses Plaid for cash, so that works whether you're on Stripe, Shopify Payments, or Square.

Will Starch remember my tone and format from last month's investor update?

Yes. The Investor Reporting app carries context about how you write and what sections you include. When you correct the first draft, tell Starch what to keep for next time and it applies that to future drafts. It won't revert to generic language every month.

Is my financial data stored by Starch? Is it secure?

Starch stores scheduled-sync data (Plaid, Stripe) in its database so your dashboards and automations can run on a schedule. Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today — that's an honest limit worth knowing before you connect sensitive financial data. If that's a hard requirement for your business, it's the right question to ask the Starch team about their roadmap.

How long does it take to actually set this up? I don't have an ops person.

The Runway Analysis and Investor Reporting templates are starting points — you connect Plaid and Stripe, answer a few questions about how you categorize spend, and the app is functional. Adding Shopify and your ad platforms takes another 10-15 minutes. The first investor update draft runs automatically. Most DTC founders get a working MBR setup in under an hour on the first session.

Can I also use this for my actual board or investor deck, not just the written update?

The Presentation Agent — currently in development, request beta access to get notified when it launches — will turn your MBR data into a slide deck directly. Until then, the Investor Reporting app produces a formatted narrative with charts that most founders email directly or paste into slides in a few minutes.