Internal Comms & Meetings

How to run a monthly business review as Professional Services Founders

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Professional Services Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You run a 12-person consultancy and your Monthly Business Review happens the hard way: someone exports HubSpot deals to a spreadsheet, someone else pulls Stripe invoices to reconcile what actually billed versus what was proposed, your ops person estimates utilization by counting calendar blocks, and you assemble all of it into a slide deck on a Sunday night. The whole thing takes 6–8 hours of senior time every month, the numbers are already stale before you present them, and you still can't answer basic questions like 'which practice area is actually profitable?' or 'which client is quietly churning?' without another hour of digging.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Professional Services Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live MBR dashboard that pulls HubSpot pipeline, Stripe revenue, Gmail client threads, and Google Calendar utilization into one view — updated automatically so the numbers are current when you sit down to review them.

An automated MBR narrative that drafts the month's wins, risks, pipeline movement, and utilization summary in your voice — so your prep time drops from a half-day to a 30-minute review and edit.

A repeatable monthly workflow that ends with a polished internal slide deck you can walk your senior team through, without anyone losing a Friday to copy-pasting numbers.

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 Stripe data on a schedule (billed revenue, payouts, invoices by client) and your Plaid bank feed on a schedule (categorized expenses, cash balances). HubSpot is connected from Starch's integration catalog and queried live when your MBR app runs — deal stage, close probability, and pipeline value pull fresh each time. Gmail is synced on a schedule so Starch can surface which client threads have gone quiet. Google Calendar connects via scheduled sync for utilization signals. No additional tools to install; your existing stack stays in place.

Prompts to copy

Build me a Monthly Business Review report that pulls our Stripe revenue by client, HubSpot pipeline by stage and close probability, and Gmail thread activity by account to flag clients we haven't spoken to in 30+ days. Show last month's billed revenue versus pipeline, highlight any deal that slipped, and draft a 200-word narrative summary I can read aloud to my team.

Show me our net burn and cash position using Plaid transactions and Stripe payouts for the last 6 months. Break expenses into payroll, contractors, software, and travel. Flag any month where burn was more than 15% above the prior month.

Create a scenario that shows what happens to our runway and margin if we add one senior hire at $140k fully loaded in April versus waiting until July, assuming current revenue growth holds.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Stripe and Plaid as scheduled-sync providers in Starch — this gives you a live feed of billed revenue, client invoices, expense categories, and cash position that refreshes automatically throughout the month.

2 Connect HubSpot from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can query your pipeline live — deal stages, close probabilities, owner assignments, and deal slippage flags pull at the moment your MBR app runs.

3 Connect Gmail via scheduled sync so Starch can track which client accounts have had recent thread activity and flag relationships that have gone quiet for 30+ days.

4 Connect Google Calendar via scheduled sync so Starch can estimate billable utilization by counting external client meetings versus internal ones across your team.

5 Open the Investor Reporting app from the App Store as your starting point — it already knows how to pull Stripe and Plaid into a structured narrative. Fork it and retitle it 'Monthly Business Review' to serve an internal audience instead of investors.

6 Describe your MBR view in plain language: tell Starch which accounts to group Stripe revenue by, which HubSpot stages count as 'active pipeline,' and what your utilization target is per person per month.

7 Use the Runway Analysis app to get a current burn-rate snapshot — real net burn from Plaid transactions against Stripe inflows, broken into payroll, contractors, and overhead, so you know your margin picture before the meeting.

8 If you're weighing a hiring decision or a pricing change, open Scenario Analysis and describe the fork: 'Show me runway if we add a senior hire in April versus July, holding current revenue growth.' Get the answer before you walk into the room.

9 Review the auto-drafted MBR narrative Starch generates — it covers billed revenue, pipeline movement, utilization estimate, and flagged client risks. Edit the 20% that needs your judgment; the 80% of data assembly is already done.

10 Schedule the MBR app to run on the last business day of each month so the numbers are current the morning of your review meeting — no manual export, no Sunday-night spreadsheet.

11 Walk your senior team through the output: revenue by client, pipeline by stage, utilization by person, cash position, and one or two scenario comparisons if a real decision is live. The meeting stays under 60 minutes because nobody is presenting stale data from memory.

12 After the meeting, use the narrative output as the basis for any client-facing or board-facing communication that quarter — the MBR becomes the source of truth rather than a one-off document nobody can find next month.

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 — 12-person strategy consultancy, $2.1M ARR

Sample numbers from a real run

Billed revenue (Stripe, March)	178,000
Pipeline — stage 4+ deals (HubSpot live query)	310,000
Pipeline — slipped from Feb close (HubSpot)	65,000
Net burn (Plaid, March)	94,000
Payroll + contractors (Plaid, categorized)	71,000
Software + overhead (Plaid, categorized)	23,000
Cash on hand (Plaid balance)	540,000
Implied runway at current burn	68

When the March MBR runs on March 31st, Starch pulls $178k billed from Stripe — slightly below the $185k target because one client delayed a milestone sign-off. HubSpot shows $310k in stage-4+ pipeline for Q2, healthy, but flags a $65k engagement that was supposed to close in February and is now in its third extension conversation — Gmail thread activity on that account dropped off in mid-February, which Starch surfaced as a 'quiet account' flag. Net burn from Plaid comes in at $94k: $71k payroll and contractor costs, $23k overhead, no surprises. Cash is $540k, which the Runway Analysis app translates to about 5.7 months at current pace. The founder runs a quick Scenario Analysis prompt — 'what happens to runway if we add a senior hire at $140k fully loaded in May and win the $65k slipped deal by end of April?' — and gets a side-by-side: with the hire and the win, runway compresses to 4.8 months; without the hire, it stays at 6.2 months. That one comparison drives the actual decision in the meeting. Total founder prep time: 25 minutes reviewing and editing the Starch-drafted narrative, versus the 6 hours it took in January before Starch was set up.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Billed revenue vs. target by client and practice area (monthly, from Stripe)

Pipeline coverage ratio — stage 4+ pipeline divided by next month's revenue target (from HubSpot)

Effective utilization rate — billable client hours as a share of total available hours (estimated from Google Calendar)

Net burn rate and months of runway (from Plaid + Stripe)

Client health score — days since last meaningful Gmail thread per active account

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Kantata / Projector / Deltek

Purpose-built PSA tools that do utilization, project accounting, and resource planning well — but they're priced and scoped for firms 10x your size, take a quarter to implement, and require migrating off the tools your team already uses.

Manual export: HubSpot + Stripe + Plaid → Google Sheets

Free and fully in your control, but it takes 4–6 hours of senior time every month and the numbers are stale the moment you finish the export.

Notion + Google Sheets template-based MBR

Works fine as a document, but it's a manually maintained artifact — there's no live data connection, so every cell is only as accurate as whoever last updated it.

HubSpot reporting alone

Great for pipeline visibility, but it doesn't know about cash, burn, or utilization — so you still have to stitch together the financial picture from Stripe and your bank feed separately.

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

We track utilization in Harvest and project budgets in Float — can Starch pull from those?

Harvest and Float are both reachable from Starch's integration catalog of 3,000+ apps, so the agent can query them live when your MBR app runs. You'd tell Starch to pull logged hours by client from Harvest and compare them against Float's capacity plan — describe what you want to see and Starch assembles the view. No scheduled sync for those tools today, so the data pulls fresh at query time rather than being stored in Starch.

Does Starch store our client financial data, or is it just passing it through?

Stripe and Plaid data syncs on a schedule and lives in Starch's database so your apps can query it quickly. HubSpot data is queried live from the integration catalog each time your app runs and isn't stored. Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today — that's worth knowing if your clients have strict data-handling requirements. We're not going to hide that.

Can Starch replace our bookkeeper or fractional CFO for the MBR?

For the data-assembly part — pulling numbers, categorizing expenses, spotting variance, drafting a narrative — yes, Starch does most of that automatically. For judgment calls (is that client relationship actually at risk? should we hire in April or July?), you still make those. Starch gives you the information faster and in better shape so you're spending your time on the decision, not the spreadsheet.

Our QuickBooks has the real P&L — can the MBR pull from there instead of Plaid?

Yes. QuickBooks is a scheduled-sync provider in Starch, so it syncs invoices, bills, payments, vendors, and journal entries on a schedule. One caveat: QuickBooks report views like P&L and Transaction List are temporarily disabled pending a fix on the connector — entity-level data syncs normally. So you can build a P&L view from journal entries and invoice/payment data in Starch today; the pre-formatted QuickBooks report pull is coming back soon.

How long does it take to set this up the first time?

Connecting Stripe, Plaid, HubSpot, and Gmail takes about 20 minutes — you authorize each one from Starch's connection browser. The first MBR app build, where you describe your accounts, groupings, and what you want in the narrative, takes another 30–60 minutes. After that, the monthly run is mostly automatic — you review and edit the output, you don't assemble it.

What if we want the MBR to go out as a slide deck, not just a document?

Presentation Agent — a Starch app that builds slide decks from a text description — is currently in development. You can request beta access to get notified when it launches. In the meantime, you can export the MBR narrative from Starch and drop it into Google Slides, or tell Starch to format the output in a way that maps cleanly to your existing deck template.