Internal Comms & Meetings

How to run a monthly business review as Small Finance Teams

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Small Finance Teams3 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Your Monthly Business Review starts on day 3 of close, when the numbers are finally clean enough to trust. You pull actuals from NetSuite or QuickBooks, reconcile them against Stripe payouts in a spreadsheet tab you've had open since Tuesday, manually key burn into the 13-week cash model, and then rebuild the slide deck from last quarter's version by overtyping old numbers. By the time the CFO asks 'what's our gross margin by product line this month versus last?' you're already behind. The MBR that should take four hours takes two days — not because the data isn't there, but because nothing talks to anything else without you in the middle.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Small Finance Teams3 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live MBR dashboard that pulls actuals from NetSuite or QuickBooks, Stripe, and Plaid on a schedule — so when close is done, your numbers are already in the room

A scenario-aware narrative that compares actuals to your hiring/revenue plan and flags material variances before the CFO has to ask

A board-ready output (deck or PDF) that goes from finalized numbers to formatted report in under 30 minutes, without a designer or a Sunday night in Google Slides

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, vendors, journal entries) and your NetSuite data on a schedule (income statements, balance sheets, journal entries). Starch connects directly to Stripe for charges, subscriptions, and payouts — synced on a schedule. Starch syncs your Plaid bank feeds on a schedule for categorized transactions and live balances. These four sources cover actuals, cash, and revenue; the MBR surfaces are built on top of all four simultaneously.

Prompts to copy

Build me a monthly business review report that pulls our actual revenue and expense data from QuickBooks and Stripe, shows gross margin by product line, compares actuals to last month's figures, calls out any line item that moved more than 10%, and formats everything into a CFO-ready narrative with an executive summary at the top.

Create a runway dashboard using our Plaid bank feeds and Stripe revenue. Show 6-month trailing net burn, current cash balance, and a 24-month forward projection. Flag if our runway drops below 12 months under any of our three hiring scenarios.

Run three scenarios for Q3: base case (current hiring plan), downside (25% slower revenue growth, freeze new headcount), and upside (two enterprise deals close in July). Show runway, break-even date, and monthly burn for each. Use our actual Stripe and Plaid data as the baseline.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect QuickBooks or NetSuite (whichever is your ERP of record) and Plaid from Starch's scheduled-sync providers. Starch begins pulling actuals — invoices, bills, vendor payments, journal entries — on your refresh cadence. No exports, no manual uploads.

2 Connect Stripe so revenue actuals and payout timing sync automatically. This is what lets Starch reconcile cash in against your P&L without you building a bridge tab.

3 Start from the Runway Analysis app in the Starch App Store. It loads immediately with your Plaid and Stripe data. Fork it and add a gross margin view that breaks down by product line using your QuickBooks or NetSuite chart of accounts categories.

4 Open Scenario Analysis and set your baseline. Your actual Stripe revenue and Plaid burn are already populated. Define your three planning scenarios — base, downside, upside — by adjusting headcount timing and revenue growth rate assumptions.

5 On close day (or the morning after), run your MBR prompt in Investor Reporting. Tell Starch the period, which variances to highlight, and the tone your CFO expects. Starch drafts the executive summary, the variance commentary, and the metrics table.

6 Review the variance flags. Starch will surface any line item that moved more than your defined threshold (e.g., 10% month-over-month or $50K absolute). Add your own commentary for the ones that need context — a one-time item, a timing difference, a vendor contract that closed early.

7 Run the scenario comparison against actuals. See where Q2 actuals landed relative to your base case assumptions. If you hired two people you didn't plan for, the downside scenario now tells you what that does to 12-month runway.

8 Export or share the MBR output. Investor Reporting can email the report directly; for internal distribution, export to PDF or a shareable link for the CFO and department heads.

9 Archive this month's MBR as the baseline for next month. The prior-period actuals stay in Starch so next month's variance analysis has a clean comparison point without you manually copying numbers between tabs.

10 Set the automation to run on the first business day after close each month — Starch pulls fresh data, runs the MBR draft, and surfaces it for your review before you've had to touch a 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

March 2026 MBR — 200-person company, 3-person finance team

Sample numbers from a real run

Net Revenue (Stripe actuals)	1,240,000
COGS (QuickBooks actuals)	496,000
Gross Profit	744,000
Gross Margin %	60
Total OpEx (QuickBooks actuals)	1,180,000
Net Burn (Plaid-reconciled)	436,000
Cash Balance (Plaid, Mar 31)	5,820,000
Implied Runway (months)	13

March close finished on April 4th. The team pulled actuals from QuickBooks — $1.24M in revenue, $496K COGS, gross margin landed at 60%, up two points from February's 58% because the lower-margin implementation services contract rolled off. Total OpEx came in at $1.18M, $40K over budget because the new engineering hire started two weeks earlier than planned. Net burn was $436K against a $410K budget. The CFO's question — 'what's our gross margin by product line?' — was answered by the MBR report Starch generated from QuickBooks entity data before the review meeting started. Cash balance was $5.82M per Plaid as of March 31st. Running the downside scenario (25% slower ARR growth, headcount freeze) showed runway compressing from 13 months to 9 months — which is the number that drove the decision to push the Q3 hire back to Q4. The MBR narrative, variance table, and scenario summary were formatted and distributed to the CFO and three department heads before noon on April 5th. Last quarter, that same output took until April 9th and two full days of analyst time.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Net burn vs. budget (month-over-month, with Plaid-reconciled cash as denominator)

Gross margin by product line (QuickBooks COGS split against Stripe revenue by product)

Implied runway in months (current cash balance divided by trailing 3-month average net burn)

OpEx variance by department — actual vs. plan (from QuickBooks bill and payment data)

Days to MBR distribution after close (the operational KPI the team actually cares about)

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Sheets + manual exports

Free and familiar, but every month you're re-building the same file from scratch — copy-pasting QuickBooks exports, manually keying Stripe numbers, and hoping you didn't overwrite last month's formula. Starch keeps the data live so the model is never stale.

NetSuite / QuickBooks built-in reporting

Your ERP is the right place to close the books; it's a poor tool for the narrative layer — it can't pull Stripe, can't write variance commentary, and can't model scenarios without a consultant building custom saved searches.

Fathom / Spotlight Reporting

Good at accounting-native dashboards from QuickBooks or Xero, but they're reporting tools, not composable surfaces — you can't add a custom scenario model, wire in Plaid cash data, or automate the narrative layer without leaving the tool.

Mosaic / Cube / Pigment

Purpose-built for FP&A at scale; excellent if you have a dedicated FP&A analyst to configure and maintain them. For a 3-person team at a 200-person company, the implementation overhead and per-seat cost are hard to justify against a workflow Starch can handle.

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

QuickBooks report views like the P&L and Transaction List — are those available in Starch?

Starch syncs QuickBooks entity-level data on a schedule — invoices, bills, payments, vendors, journal entries, and more. The standard report views (P&L, Transaction List, Vendor Expenses) are temporarily unavailable pending a connector fix on our end. In practice, your MBR surfaces are built from the underlying entities, not the canned reports, so for most use cases this isn't a gap. If you relied on a specific QuickBooks report format, let us know — the fix is in progress.

We use NetSuite, not QuickBooks. Does the same setup work?

Yes. Starch syncs your NetSuite data on a schedule — income statements, balance sheets, journal entries, invoices, and expenses. The MBR recipe works the same way; you'd connect NetSuite instead of QuickBooks as your ERP source, and Starch pulls from both NetSuite and Stripe/Plaid simultaneously.

Can Starch replace our 13-week cash model spreadsheet?

Starch can build you a custom cash flow surface that pulls live from Plaid (bank balances, categorized transactions) and Stripe (payout timing), and lets you layer in assumptions on top. It won't look like a 13-week grid if you don't want it to — describe the format you actually use and Starch builds it that way. It's not a spreadsheet replacement for all purposes, but it's the right tool for a recurring model that needs live data and scenario variants.

Is the data stored or just queried live? We care about month-over-month comparisons.

For the scheduled-sync providers — QuickBooks, NetSuite, Stripe, and Plaid — Starch syncs data on a schedule and stores it, which means prior-period actuals are available for comparison without re-pulling. For apps you connect from Starch's integration catalog that aren't scheduled-sync providers, data is queried live and not stored historically. For MBR variance analysis, the four sources above cover your core accounting and cash data, so month-over-month comparisons work as you'd expect.

Can Starch send the MBR output automatically, or does someone on the team have to review it first?

Both patterns work. You can set an automation that drafts the MBR on a trigger (e.g., first business day after close) and queues it for your review before distribution. Or you can build a fully automated flow where Starch sends the report directly once the data is available. Most finance teams prefer the draft-and-review pattern for the first few months until they trust the output — which is what we'd recommend.

We're not SOC 2 certified — is Starch?

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your company requires SOC 2 Type II from financial data vendors, that's a real constraint worth naming. We're working toward certification; if this is a blocker for your team, reach out and we can share where we are in the process.