Internal Comms & Meetings

How to run a monthly business review as Small Investor Relations Teams

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Small Investor Relations Teams4 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Your two-person IR team is closing books on another month and the MBR is due to the GP tomorrow. You're copy-pasting burn numbers from QuickBooks into a spreadsheet, cross-checking against Plaid transactions to find the line item your CFO flagged, pulling Stripe MRR into a separate tab, and then manually formatting all of it into a slide deck that somehow still looks like it was made at 11pm — because it was. The institutional tools your peers at larger funds use (Juniper Square, Addepar) cost more than your ops budget and assume someone dedicated to running them. You're producing a reporting operation built for twice the headcount, every single month.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Small Investor Relations Teams4 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live MBR dashboard that pulls QuickBooks, Stripe, and Plaid data on a schedule — so by the first of each month your burn, MRR, runway, and expense breakdown are already populated, not waiting on your bookkeeper

An AI-drafted MBR narrative your GP or LP committee can read in five minutes, covering cash position, portfolio KPIs, top wins, and open risks — with the same tone and structure every month so LPs stop asking you to reformat it

A meeting-notes archive with action items extracted from every LP call, GP partner meeting, and capital call discussion, linked back to the month they came from so nothing falls through the cracks between reviews

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 Meeting Notes Scenario Analysis

Data sources & config

Starch connects directly to QuickBooks and syncs your invoices, bills, payments, vendors, and journal entries on a schedule. Starch syncs your Stripe charges, invoices, subscriptions, and payouts on a schedule. Starch syncs your Plaid bank transactions and balances on a schedule. For LP portal data (DocSend activity, Intralinks access logs), Starch automates those sites through your browser — no API needed. Google Calendar and Gmail are synced on a schedule for meeting capture and LP email threading.

Prompts to copy

Build me a monthly business review dashboard for our IR team. Pull burn and cash balance from QuickBooks and Plaid on a schedule. Pull MRR and new subscription revenue from Stripe. Show 6-month trailing burn trend, current runway in months, and a category breakdown of operating expenses. Flag any expense category that moved more than 15% from last month.

Draft the narrative section of our March 2026 MBR. Our net burn was $410K, runway is 19 months, MRR grew 8% to $1.2M. We closed two new LPs. Open risk: one portfolio company missed its Q1 revenue milestone by 20%. Write this in the same tone as the February update — factual, no spin, two paragraphs.

After each LP call or GP meeting, capture the transcript, summarize key decisions, and extract action items with owner names. Archive by month so I can search 'commitment pacing' and find every time we discussed it in the last six months.

Show me three scenarios for our fund's operating expenses through year-end: baseline (current burn), a 10% reduction if we defer one hire, and what happens if our largest portfolio company draws its full remaining capital call in Q3. Pull the current baseline from Plaid and QuickBooks.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect QuickBooks, Stripe, and Plaid in Starch — all three sync on a schedule, so by the first business day of each month your expense, revenue, and cash data is already current without any manual export.

2 Start from the Investor Reporting app in the Starch App Store — it already knows how to pull burn from Plaid, MRR from Stripe, and format a narrative update. Fork it and add your fund-specific fields: commitment pacing, portfolio company milestones, capital call schedule.

3 Add the Runway Analysis app and wire it to the same Plaid and Stripe connections. Set it to show 6-month historical burn trend and 24-month forward projection — this becomes the single source of truth your GP references instead of a spreadsheet that's already stale.

4 Describe the KPI dashboard you actually want in plain language: 'Show me net burn, runway in months, MRR, new LP commitments this month, and any portfolio company that missed its revenue milestone. Refresh daily.' Starch builds the view; you don't touch a chart tool.

5 Connect Google Calendar and Gmail in Starch on a scheduled sync. Install the Meeting Notes app so every LP call, GP meeting, and capital call discussion is transcribed and summarized automatically — key decisions and action items extracted with owner names.

6 On the last business day of the month, open the MBR draft in Investor Reporting. Answer four questions about what happened this period (top win, open risk, any guidance change, anything the GP needs to decide). Starch writes the narrative section consistent with last month's tone.

7 For months where the GP needs scenario context — a potential new hire, an LP asking about J-curve timing, a portfolio company requesting bridge capital — open Scenario Analysis, connect it to the same Plaid and Stripe baseline, and describe the scenarios you want to compare. No new spreadsheet.

8 Use the Presentation Agent (currently in development — request beta access) to turn the completed MBR data and narrative into a formatted slide deck for the GP or LP committee. Until it launches, export the narrative and KPI tables from Starch and paste into your existing template — the data is already clean.

9 For LP contacts and your investor CRM, describe what you want to Starch: 'Build me a contact tracker that shows each LP's commitment amount, last communication date, open data room requests, and any action items from our last call.' Starch builds it; your CFO can view it too without you handing over your spreadsheet.

10 On the second business day of each month, your MBR package — dashboard, narrative, action items from last month's LP calls — is ready for GP review. Send the investor update directly from Starch to your LP distribution list on whatever cadence you set.

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 close — 2-person IR team, $180M fund

Sample numbers from a real run

Net burn (March)	410,000
Cash balance (Plaid, March 31)	7,820,000
Runway at current burn	19
MRR across portfolio (Stripe-reported companies)	1,200,000
MRR growth vs February	8
New LP commitments closed in March	2
Open capital call — Portfolio Co. C (Q3 draw)	2,500,000

In a normal March, this MBR would have taken two days: export QuickBooks into a spreadsheet, reconcile against Plaid to find the $34K variance your CFO flagged (it was a vendor payment that hit April 1), pull Stripe MRR manually from the dashboard, and write a narrative that sounded like last month's narrative without actually opening last month's file. This time, QuickBooks, Plaid, and Stripe all synced into Starch by March 31. The dashboard showed net burn of $410K (up 6% from February — the variance was the accelerated vendor payment, flagged automatically), cash balance of $7.82M, and runway of 19 months. MRR across the two portfolio companies reporting through Stripe was $1.2M, up 8%. The GP asked for a scenario showing what happens if Portfolio Co. C draws its full $2.5M capital call in Q3 rather than splitting it. Scenario Analysis pulled the Plaid and QuickBooks baseline and returned three paths — baseline 19-month runway, Q3 full draw dropping to 13 months, Q3 full draw with one deferred hire at 15 months — in about four minutes. The meeting notes from the March LP advisory call surfaced an action item assigned to you: send the updated commitment pacing schedule to two LPs by April 10. That item had been sitting in a call transcript you would otherwise have re-read manually. The full MBR package was ready for GP review by 9am on April 2.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Net burn vs prior month (absolute and percentage change, reconciled against Plaid and QuickBooks)

Runway in months at current burn rate, updated as Plaid transactions land

LP commitment pacing: called capital vs. total commitments by vintage and tranche

Portfolio company MRR growth (for companies reporting through Stripe), tracked month-over-month

Open LP action items and data room access requests pending response, by LP name

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Juniper Square or Addepar

Purpose-built for fund IR and LP reporting, but costs $50K+ per year, assumes a dedicated IR-ops analyst to run it, and won't connect to your operational data (Stripe, Plaid) without custom work — you'd still be maintaining a parallel spreadsheet for the business metrics your GP actually asks about.

Excel or Google Sheets + manual QuickBooks export

Free and familiar, but every MBR starts from scratch — you're exporting, reconciling, and reformatting the same data monthly; one QuickBooks field name change breaks the whole model and you find out the morning the GP needs it.

Q4 Inc. or Nasdaq IR Suite

Strong for public-company investor relations and earnings disclosure workflows, but priced and designed for companies with a full IR department; won't help you build the internal MBR dashboard your GP reads on the first of every month.

Notion + manual data entry

Good for narrative and action item tracking, but you're still maintaining the financial data manually — Notion doesn't connect to QuickBooks or Plaid, so the burn number is always as stale as the last time someone typed it in.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — investor reporting, runway analysis, meeting notes 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 connect to QuickBooks, or do I have to export a CSV?

Starch connects directly to QuickBooks and syncs more than 20 entity types — invoices, bills, payments, vendors, journal entries — on a schedule. No CSV, no manual export. One thing worth knowing: QuickBooks report views like P&L and Transaction List are temporarily unavailable due to an upstream connector issue. Entity-level data syncs normally, so your burn calculation works; the formatted P&L report view does not until that's fixed.

Our LP portal is on DocSend or Intralinks, which has no public API. Can Starch reach it?

Yes. Starch automates DocSend and Intralinks through your browser — no API needed. It can check access logs, pull document view data, and update your LP contact tracker based on what it finds. The same browser automation works for any LP portal or fund admin system that's web-based.

We use a shared investor CRM that our CFO also edits. Will Starch conflict with that?

Starch builds its own surface on top of your data — it doesn't write back to your existing CRM unless you explicitly set up an automation to do so. You can describe exactly the investor contact view you want ('show commitment amount, last contact date, open data room requests, and last call action items by LP') and Starch builds that as a separate app your team uses, while the CFO keeps editing whatever system they're in.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We have LPs who ask about data security.

Not yet — Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. If your LPs require SOC 2 certification from every tool that touches fund data, that's a genuine blocker you should weigh. There's no on-prem or self-hosted option either.

Can I use Starch to generate the actual LP letter PDF or slide deck, or just the data and narrative draft?

The Investor Reporting app generates the narrative and sends it by email to your LP distribution list on whatever cadence you set. For a formatted slide deck, the Presentation Agent app is currently in development — request beta access to get notified when it launches. Until then, Starch produces the draft narrative and clean data that you paste into your existing template; that step still takes about ten minutes, not two hours.

Our fund uses NetSuite, not QuickBooks. Does that change anything?

Starch connects directly to NetSuite and syncs invoices, expenses, journal entries, balance sheets, and income statements on a schedule — same pattern as QuickBooks. The Investor Reporting starter app in the App Store lists NetSuite as a primary connection, so you're not building from scratch.