Strategy & Planning

How to run a scenario analysis for a strategic decision as Chief of Staff and Founder's Office

Strategy & PlanningFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You're the one who gets asked 'what happens if we delay the Series B six months?' at 4pm on a Thursday. You don't have a finance hire. You have a Stripe dashboard, a Plaid-connected bank account, a QuickBooks file your bookkeeper updates monthly, and a spreadsheet you built last quarter that's already stale. Running a real scenario — hiring freeze vs. 15% price increase vs. pushing the raise by two quarters — means manually pulling numbers from three places, rebuilding the model, and doing it again when the CEO changes an assumption. By the time the deck is ready, half the inputs have moved. You need scenarios that stay connected to live data, not a model you have to rebuild from scratch every time the question changes.

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Strategy & PlanningFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live scenario analysis dashboard that pulls actual burn and revenue from Stripe and Plaid, so your baseline is always current — not last month's bookkeeper close

Side-by-side scenario comparisons (hiring freeze, price increase, delayed raise, slower growth) with runway, net burn, and break-even under each set of assumptions

A reusable model you can hand the CEO or a board member with confidence, because it's connected to real numbers, not a spreadsheet you filled in by hand

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

Scenario Analysis Runway Analysis

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Stripe revenue data and Plaid bank transaction data on a schedule — these feed the live baseline for both the Runway Analysis and Scenario Analysis apps. No manual CSV uploads, no waiting for the books to close. QuickBooks entity-level data (invoices, bills, payments) can be wired in from Starch's direct QuickBooks connection for a more detailed cost breakdown if needed.

Prompts to copy

Build me a scenario analysis comparing four cases: our current plan, a hiring freeze starting in May, a 15% price increase on our Growth tier starting in June, and pushing our Series B from Q3 to Q1 next year. Pull the baseline from our actual Stripe revenue and Plaid bank transactions. Show runway, monthly net burn, and break-even month for each scenario.

Show me our last 6 months of actual net burn from Plaid and Stripe, broken down by expense category, so I have a clean baseline before I start adjusting assumptions in the scenario model.

Add a fifth scenario: 20% slower revenue growth than plan, with no changes to headcount or spend. Show how it affects break-even and the fundraising timeline.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Stripe and Plaid in Starch — both sync on a schedule, so your actual revenue and cash outflows are always current. This is the baseline every scenario will be anchored to.

2 Open the Runway Analysis app from the App Store. Confirm that the calculated net burn and current runway match what you'd expect — if anything looks off, it's usually a categorization issue in Plaid that you can fix in a few clicks.

3 Open the Scenario Analysis app. Your actual Stripe and Plaid data is already wired in as the baseline plan — you're not entering numbers by hand.

4 Type your first scenario in plain language: 'Freeze all new hiring from May onward. Everything else stays the same. Show runway and net burn month by month.' Starch builds the model and shows you the output.

5 Add your second scenario — for example, a 15% price increase on your Growth tier starting in June. Describe the revenue impact as you understand it; Starch adjusts the projection.

6 Add a third scenario for a delayed fundraise: 'Push the Series B from Q3 2026 to Q1 2027. Keep current burn. Show how much additional cash we need and whether current runway covers the gap.'

7 Ask Starch to put all scenarios side by side: runway, monthly net burn at month 6 and month 12, and break-even month for each. This is the view you'll share with the CEO.

8 Stress-test the revenue line: 'Add a scenario with 20% slower ARR growth than plan, no headcount changes. Show what changes in the fundraising timeline.' This is the question the board will ask; answer it before they do.

9 If you want more granular cost detail, wire in QuickBooks from Starch's direct connection. Ask Starch to break down the expense baseline by vendor category — headcount, software, hosting, G&A — so each scenario's burn number is traceable.

10 Once the model looks right, describe a summary view: 'Build me a one-page summary showing the four scenarios with a plain-English recommendation on which path preserves the most optionality given current ARR growth.' Use this as the basis for your board prep or exec discussion.

11 Save the scenario set and set a weekly refresh reminder. When Stripe and Plaid data update on their sync schedule, your baseline updates automatically — you're not rebuilding the model next month from scratch.

12 If you need a slide deck for the board or the CEO, describe what you need: 'Build a 5-slide summary of our scenario analysis — one slide per scenario plus a recommendation slide.' The Presentation Agent app (currently in development — request beta access) will handle the formatting so you're not doing it in Google Slides at midnight.

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

Q2 2026 Strategic Planning — Hiring vs. Fundraising Timing Decision

Sample numbers from a real run

Current monthly net burn (Plaid + Stripe baseline)	310,000
Current cash on hand (Plaid balance)	4,850,000
Runway at current burn — baseline scenario	15
Runway if hiring freeze from May — Scenario B	21
Runway if 15% price increase in June — Scenario C	19
Runway if Series B delayed to Q1 2027 — Scenario D	15

It's late April 2026. The CEO wants to know whether to proceed with three planned engineering hires in May or preserve runway. You have $4.85M in the bank, $310K in monthly net burn pulled live from Plaid and Stripe, and a Series B process that's 60 days from kicking off. You run the scenario model in Starch. Baseline: 15 months of runway at current burn — tight if the raise takes longer than expected. Hiring freeze from May: burn drops to roughly $250K/month, pushing runway to 21 months. That's 6 additional months of cushion without touching revenue. A 15% price increase on the Growth tier — which you've been considering anyway — gets you to 19 months while keeping the team intact. Delayed Series B alone (no other changes) doesn't move the needle: still 15 months, and now you're raising from a weaker position later in the year. The scenario that falls apart fastest is the default plan with slower-than-projected revenue growth: if ARR grows 20% slower than forecast, runway compresses to 11 months, and the raise needs to close by November. You share the side-by-side view with the CEO in 20 minutes. The answer is clear: price increase first, hiring decision revisited in 60 days based on where the raise stands.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Months of runway under each scenario (not just current burn rate — the scenario-adjusted number)

Net burn delta between scenarios — how much each lever (hiring, pricing, fundraising timing) is actually worth in cash terms

Break-even month: the date on which a scenario flips cash-flow positive, if it does

Revenue growth rate vs. plan — the key input sensitivity that changes every other output

Board-readiness of the model: can you hand it to an investor and defend every assumption in under 5 minutes

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Excel or Google Sheets

More flexible for edge-case modeling, but the baseline is always manual — you copy-paste from Stripe and Plaid every time, and the model is stale the moment you close it

Mosaic or Runway.com

Purpose-built FP&A tools with deep accounting integrations, but they're priced and scoped for a finance team, not a chief of staff who needs to spin up a model fast without a 6-week onboarding

Notion or Coda financial templates

Fine for narrative planning documents but not connected to live Stripe and Plaid data — you end up with a good-looking table that's still manually maintained

Your bookkeeper's monthly close in QuickBooks

Accurate but always 3-4 weeks late; can't run what-if scenarios, and you can't get an answer at 4pm Thursday when the CEO asks

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — scenario planning, runway analysis 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

Is the baseline actually live, or am I still entering numbers by hand?

The baseline is live. Starch syncs your Stripe revenue and Plaid bank transactions on a schedule, so the burn rate and cash position your scenarios are anchored to reflect real data — not a number you typed in last Tuesday. You adjust assumptions on top of that baseline; the raw inputs update automatically.

What if my books aren't closed yet? Will the numbers be wrong?

Starch pulls from Plaid bank transactions and Stripe charges directly — not from your closed QuickBooks P&L. That means the burn figure reflects actual cash movement, not an accountant-adjusted accrual number. It's a different lens than your bookkeeper's monthly close, which is useful for scenario planning because it reflects what's actually happening in your accounts today.

Can I use QuickBooks data in the scenario model too?

Yes. Starch connects directly to QuickBooks and syncs entity-level data — invoices, bills, vendor payments, journal entries. You can use that to build a more granular cost breakdown underneath the scenario model. Note: QuickBooks report views (like the P&L summary report) are temporarily disabled pending a fix, but entity-level data syncs normally, so you can still slice costs by category.

What if I need to model something Starch hasn't seen before — a new product line, a strategic acquisition?

Describe it. You can tell Starch 'add a scenario where we launch a second product in Q3 that adds $50K in monthly revenue starting in September but requires $120K in one-time launch spend.' Starch builds the assumption into the model on top of the live baseline. You don't need a formula or a schema — just describe what you're testing.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I'm connecting bank account and revenue data.

Not yet — Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. If that's a hard requirement for your company before connecting financial data, that's worth knowing upfront. It's on the roadmap.

Can I share the scenario output with my CEO or board without rebuilding it as a slide deck?

You can share a Starch app view directly, which works well for internal review. If you need a polished deck, the Presentation Agent — currently in development, with beta access available — will let you describe the slide format and generate it from the scenario data. For now, the scenario model output is clear enough that most founders use it directly in exec conversations without reformatting.

What's the difference between Runway Analysis and Scenario Analysis — do I need both?

Runway Analysis gives you a single, live view of where you stand today: actual net burn, cash on hand, projected runway at current pace. It's the source of truth for 'what's the number right now.' Scenario Analysis starts from that baseline and asks 'what if.' For a strategic decision — hire vs. freeze, raise now vs. later — you want both: Runway Analysis to ground the baseline, Scenario Analysis to test the alternatives.