Strategy & Planning

How to run a scenario analysis for a strategic decision as Foundation and Nonprofit Ops Teams

Strategy & PlanningFor Foundation and Nonprofit Ops Teams3 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Your foundation's budget-vs-actuals live in a QuickBooks instance and a shared Google Sheet that nobody trusts after the third manual copy-paste. When the board asks 'what happens to program spend if we accelerate the climate grants cohort by two quarters,' you spend a week building a spreadsheet model from scratch — pulling actuals from QuickBooks, reconciling against the Google Sheet budget, and guessing at grant disbursement timing. The model is stale before you finish it. You don't have a CFO. You don't have a finance analyst. You have three people and a board meeting in eleven days.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Strategy & PlanningFor Foundation and Nonprofit Ops Teams3 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live scenario analysis dashboard that compares your baseline program budget against 2–3 alternative spending paths — accelerated grantmaking, hiring a program officer, delaying a cohort — with runway and cash impact shown side-by-side, pulled directly from your actual QuickBooks data.

A reusable model you can re-run every quarter without rebuilding it, so the week before a board meeting is a one-hour update, not a five-day fire drill.

A natural-language interface for asking 'what if' questions — adjust one assumption, see how it ripples through the next 18 months of program spend and operating reserves.

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 Budgeting Runway Analysis

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule — invoices, bills, payments, vendors, and journal entries refresh automatically so every scenario reflects real actuals, not last month's export. For foundations using Xero or Salesforce (your grants pipeline), connect them from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries them live when your apps run. If your donor portal or state charity registration site doesn't have an API, Starch automates it through your browser — no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Connect my QuickBooks account and build me a scenario analysis that shows three futures: (1) baseline — program spend continues at current pace, (2) accelerated — we disburse the climate cohort grants six months early, adding $2.1M in Q3, and (3) delayed — we push the climate cohort to next fiscal year and redirect $800K to operating reserves. For each scenario, show cash runway, month-by-month burn, and ending reserve balance through December 2027.

Using my QuickBooks actuals, build me a quarterly budget tracker that compares program grants, operating expenses, and investment draws against the plan we set in January — flag any category where we're more than 10% off pace.

Show me a live burn chart combining our operating expense run rate from QuickBooks with our current reserve balance, updated on a schedule, so I can see at a glance how many months of operations we can sustain before we need to draw from the endowment again.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect QuickBooks to Starch — Starch syncs your chart of accounts, bills, payments, and journal entries on a schedule. This becomes the baseline for every scenario.

2 Open the Scenario Analysis app from Starch's App Store. It already knows how to read revenue and expense data; you'll customize the account groupings to match how your foundation thinks — program grants, admin overhead, investment management fees.

3 Tell Starch your baseline: current operating expense run rate, expected grant disbursements by quarter, and the balance in your operating reserve account. Use plain language — Starch maps your description to the right QuickBooks entities.

4 Define Scenario A (your baseline), Scenario B (accelerated climate cohort — $2.1M disbursed in Q3 instead of spread over four quarters), and Scenario C (delayed cohort, funds reallocated to operating reserves). Type each one as a one-paragraph description of what changes and what stays the same.

5 Starch builds the three-way comparison: runway months, monthly burn rate, cumulative cash position through your chosen horizon. Review the outputs and flag any assumptions that look wrong — for example, if the model is counting a pledged gift as committed when it isn't yet.

6 Add a Budgeting view so you can track the current quarter's actual program spend against the plan category by category — grant disbursements, staff, travel, consultants. Pace indicators show you whether each bucket is on track without a manual reconciliation.

7 If your Salesforce grants pipeline is connected from Starch's integration catalog, the agent can pull expected grant approval dates and amounts live — so your scenario model accounts for multi-year grant commitments already in the pipeline, not just what's already hit QuickBooks.

8 Share the scenario view with your ED and board chair before the meeting. Instead of a static PDF they'll question, they're looking at a live dashboard they can interact with — adjust the climate cohort timing themselves and see the cash impact update in real time.

9 At the board meeting, use the scenario panel to walk through the decision: accelerate the cohort and you exit the fiscal year with $1.4M in reserves; delay it and you carry $3.2M but defer impact. The numbers are from your actual books, not a spreadsheet someone built six months ago.

10 After the board decides, lock the chosen scenario as the new operating plan. Starch continues syncing QuickBooks actuals on a schedule, so variance vs. plan surfaces automatically each month — no manual update cycle.

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

Climate Cohort Acceleration Decision — Q2 2026 Board Meeting

Sample numbers from a real run

Program Grants — Climate Cohort (accelerated)	2,100,000
Program Grants — Education Initiative (unchanged)	480,000
Operating Expenses — Staff + Admin (annual)	620,000
Investment Draw (planned)	400,000
Operating Reserve — Opening Balance	3,800,000
Operating Reserve — Scenario B Ending (Dec 2026)	1,000,000
Operating Reserve — Scenario C Ending (Dec 2026)	3,100,000

The foundation's ED needed to bring a concrete recommendation to the June board meeting about whether to accelerate the $2.1M climate cohort disbursement into Q3 2026 or push it to Q1 2027. In the past, the ops team would have built a spreadsheet over three days, pulling QuickBooks actuals manually and reverse-engineering the budget from last year's board packet PDF. This time, Starch had already synced the QuickBooks data — 14 months of bills, payments, and journal entries. The ops manager described three scenarios in plain language. Scenario A (baseline): disburse the climate cohort as originally scheduled across Q4 2026 and Q1 2027. Scenario B (accelerate): front-load the full $2.1M in Q3, alongside the ongoing $480K education initiative and $620K in annual operating costs. Scenario C (delay): push the climate cohort entirely to Q1 2027, redirect $800K to operating reserves. Starch built the comparison in under ten minutes. Scenario B leaves the foundation with $1.0M in operating reserves by December — enough to cover roughly 19 months of operating expenses, but tighter than the board's informal 24-month target. Scenario C preserves $3.1M in reserves but delays climate grants impact by nine months. The ED walked into the board meeting with a live dashboard, not a PDF. The board chose Scenario B with a contingency: if a pledged $750K gift from a named donor didn't close by September 1, they'd revert to the original schedule. The ops manager updated the scenario assumption in Starch in 30 seconds and the revised Scenario B runway updated immediately — $1.75M ending reserve if the gift closes, $1.0M if it doesn't.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Operating reserve months — how many months of operating expenses the current reserve covers under each scenario

Grant disbursement pace — actual disbursements vs. planned schedule by program cohort, quarter over quarter

Program spend as a percentage of total expenditures — most foundations target 75–85%; scenarios that dip below that trigger board questions

Variance of actual QuickBooks spend vs. approved budget by category (grants, admin, investment fees)

Cash runway to next planned investment draw — how many months before you need to pull from the endowment again

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Excel or Google Sheets model built by a consultant

You get a sophisticated one-time model that's stale the week you receive it and requires manual QuickBooks exports every time actuals change — which is every month.

Fluxx or Foundant (purpose-built grants management platforms)

They handle grant tracking and compliance workflows well, but their financial scenario modeling is thin and they cost six figures annually — sized for a 40-person program office, not a 4-person ops team.

Adaptive Insights or Vena (FP&A platforms)

Serious modeling power, but implementation takes months, requires a finance professional to maintain, and pricing assumes a corporate finance department, not a foundation ops team wearing six hats.

QuickBooks reports + manual board deck

Free and familiar, but QuickBooks report views don't do scenario comparison — you're looking at history, not forward projections, and translating that into a board presentation is a manual, week-long process every quarter.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — scenario planning, quarterly budgeting, 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

Our QuickBooks chart of accounts was set up by a bookkeeper who no longer works with us and uses account names that don't match how we talk about programs. Will Starch understand it?

Yes. Starch syncs all your QuickBooks entities — invoices, bills, payments, journal entries — and you describe in plain language how to group them. You might say 'treat anything coded to accounts 6100–6199 as Program Grants — Climate' and Starch applies that mapping going forward. You're not locked into however the chart of accounts was originally structured.

We use Salesforce for grant tracking, not just accounting data. Can the scenario model factor in multi-year grant commitments that are in the pipeline but haven't hit QuickBooks yet?

Yes. Connect Salesforce from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live when your scenario app runs. You can tell Starch to pull committed but unpaid grants from Salesforce and include them as expected disbursements in your forward projections, so the model reflects what you've already approved, not just what's already been cut.

We don't use Stripe — we receive most gifts by wire and occasionally check. How does Starch handle revenue that isn't coming through a payment processor?

The Scenario Analysis app is built around Plaid and Stripe, but your scenario baseline can be set manually from your QuickBooks actuals — which do capture wire receipts and check deposits once your bookkeeper records them. You describe your expected gift income as assumptions in plain language, and Starch holds them as inputs rather than live-queried data. It's less automated than a Stripe integration, but it accurately reflects how most foundations receive gifts.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We have to think about data security when connecting our financials.

Not yet — Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. That's worth knowing before connecting sensitive financial data. It's on the roadmap. If your foundation has strict vendor security requirements, you'll want to factor that in.

Can I use this for the board packet — not just the modeling, but the actual slides?

The Presentation Agent — currently in development, request beta access — will build slide decks from a text description and can pull in data from your connected sources. For now, you can export scenario outputs from Starch and build the deck manually, or describe what you need and Starch can generate a structured narrative you drop into your existing template.

We run our fiscal year June–May, not calendar year. Will the scenario model respect that?

Yes. When you describe your scenario, tell Starch your fiscal year dates. The projections, runway calculations, and budget comparisons will use your actual fiscal calendar, not a default January–December assumption.