Strategy & Planning

How to run a scenario analysis for a strategic decision as Professional Services Founders

Strategy & PlanningFor Professional Services Founders2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

You're about to decide whether to hire a second project manager, pitch a new retainer to a prospect, or hold cash through a slow Q3. The analysis you need lives across Stripe invoices, your Plaid bank feed, and a QuickBooks file your bookkeeper updates once a month. You build a scenario in Google Sheets, realize the revenue assumptions are stale, go pull a Stripe export, paste it in, break three formulas, and two hours later you have a model that's already out of date. Enterprise tools like Adaptive Insights or Anaplan cost more per seat than your junior consultants bill. So the decision gets made on gut feel, or you delay it, which is its own kind of choice.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Strategy & PlanningFor Professional Services Founders2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live baseline model pulling real burn from Plaid and real revenue from Stripe — not a number you typed in last month and forgot to update

Three to five named scenarios (hire now, delay hire, raise retainer rates, lose the anchor client) sitting side-by-side with runway and break-even for each

A reusable modeling surface you can re-run any time a deal closes, a client churns, or your bookkeeper sends new actuals — no spreadsheet rebuilding required

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 data on a schedule (charges, invoices, subscriptions) and your Plaid bank feed on a schedule (categorized transactions and balances) — these become the live baseline for both the Runway Analysis and Scenario Analysis apps. QuickBooks entity data (bills, invoices, vendors, payments) also syncs on a schedule if you want actuals reconciled to your books. No manual exports, no paste-overs.

Prompts to copy

Build me a scenario analysis comparing three versions of Q3: one where we hire a second PM in July, one where we delay to October, and one where we don't hire and instead raise our day rates by 15%. Pull our actual revenue from Stripe and our actual burn from Plaid as the baseline. Show runway, net burn, and break-even month for each scenario.

Show me a 24-month runway projection based on our current Stripe revenue and Plaid transactions. Break expenses into payroll, contractors, software, and other. Flag the month we drop below 3 months of cash.

Add a fourth scenario to the model: we lose our largest retainer client (roughly $18,000/month) in August. How does that change break-even and runway compared to the base case?

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Stripe in Starch — Starch syncs your charges, invoices, and subscription data on a schedule so your revenue baseline is always current, not last-export-current.

2 Connect your business bank account through Plaid — Starch syncs categorized transactions and running balances so burn is calculated from what actually left the account, not from a QuickBooks estimate.

3 Open the Runway Analysis app from the App Store. Verify the 6-month burn trend and make sure payroll, contractors, and software are breaking out the way you expect. Correct any miscategorized transactions by telling Starch which category they belong to.

4 Once the baseline looks right, open the Scenario Analysis app. Your live Stripe revenue and Plaid burn automatically become the starting point — you don't type in a single number.

5 Name your first scenario ('Hire PM in July') and describe the assumption change: one additional FTE at your loaded cost, starting July 1. Starch updates runway and break-even for that future state.

6 Add a second scenario ('Delay to October') with the same hire at a later start date. Add a third ('Rate increase') where you hold headcount and model a 15% day-rate uplift applied to active retainer clients.

7 If a specific client risk is on your mind — an anchor client up for renewal, a prospect that could double revenue — add it as a fourth scenario. Describe it in plain language; Starch builds the branch.

8 Review the side-by-side comparison. Look at the month each scenario crosses below your cash floor, and the break-even date for each. These are the numbers you bring to the decision.

9 If you present to investors or a board, describe the format you need: 'Summarize the three scenarios in a table with runway, net burn, and break-even, formatted for a board update email.' Starch drafts the output.

10 Set a recurring refresh cadence — weekly or after any major deal event — so the model re-runs against updated Stripe and Plaid data without you touching it.

11 When a retainer closes or a client churns, update the relevant scenario assumption in plain language and the model recalculates. No formula auditing, no cell references to fix.

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

July 2026 hiring decision — 12-person consultancy, $95K MRR

Sample numbers from a real run

Stripe MRR (7 active retainers)	95,000
Payroll — current 12 FTE (loaded)	71,000
Contractors (overflow project work)	8,500
Software, tools, and G&A	4,200
Net burn — base case	12,300
Cash on hand (Plaid balance)	198,000

At $95K MRR and $83,700 in monthly costs, the base case shows 16 months of runway and a break-even that's already passed — you're nominally profitable. The question is whether to hire a second PM at $85K fully loaded ($7,100/month) to take on the two enterprise proposals sitting in your pipeline. Scenario A (hire in July) drops net burn to -$5,200/month — you're briefly cash-negative while the new work ramps — and runway compresses to 11 months before the new retainers close. Scenario B (delay to October) holds runway at 16 months but risks losing one of the two enterprise bids to a competitor who can staff immediately. Scenario C (rate increase) models raising your blended day rate from $1,850 to $2,130 across the four clients on time-and-materials contracts; if two of four accept, MRR lifts to $103K and runway extends to 22 months without the headcount risk. The Starch model surfaces this trade-off in a single view — 11 months vs. 16 months vs. 22 months — with the same baseline Stripe and Plaid numbers feeding all three. The decision is still yours, but at least you're making it with the actual numbers, not a spreadsheet you built in February.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Months of cash runway at current burn (updated daily from Plaid + Stripe, not monthly from the bookkeeper)

Net burn rate — gross revenue minus total cash out, segmented by payroll, contractors, and G&A

Break-even month under each scenario — the date revenue covers costs without relying on current cash reserves

Utilization-adjusted revenue risk — what percentage of MRR is exposed if your largest one or two retainers churn

Scenario delta — how many months of runway separate your best-case and worst-case assumptions, which tells you how much optionality you actually have before a decision becomes urgent

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Sheets / Excel model

Full control over every formula, but the baseline goes stale the moment you close the tab — you're back to manual Stripe exports and paste-overs every time you want current numbers.

Adaptive Insights / Anaplan

Enterprise-grade financial modeling with deep audit trails, but per-seat pricing and implementation timelines are sized for 200-person finance teams, not a 12-person consultancy where you're the CFO.

Float (cash flow forecasting)

Good at short-horizon cash forecasting connected to QuickBooks or Xero, but scenario branching ('what if we hire vs. raise rates') requires manual workarounds rather than named, side-by-side model comparison.

Mosaic or Runway (startup finance tools)

Purpose-built for VC-backed startups tracking ARR metrics; the mental model doesn't map cleanly to a services business where revenue is project-based and utilization is the real lever.

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

My books are in QuickBooks but my Stripe data is patchy — some clients pay by ACH, not card. Will the baseline be accurate?

Starch syncs QuickBooks entity data (invoices, payments, bills, vendors) on a schedule alongside your Plaid bank transactions. For clients who pay by ACH or check, the Plaid feed captures the actual deposit regardless of how the invoice was processed. You can tell Starch which Plaid transaction categories map to client revenue and which are pass-through costs, and it will apply that logic consistently across the model.

Can I model a scenario where a specific client churns — not just a revenue percentage?

Yes. Describe it by name or by amount: 'Add a scenario where the Meridian Group retainer at $18,000/month ends in September.' Starch builds that branch against the live baseline and shows you how runway and break-even shift relative to your other scenarios.

Will this replace my bookkeeper or my accountant?

No, and it's not trying to. Starch reads your Stripe and Plaid data to power a decision-making model — it doesn't close your books, file taxes, or produce GAAP statements. Think of it as the layer between your bookkeeper's monthly close and the moment you need to make a call about hiring or pricing.

Does Starch store my bank transaction data? I'm cautious about connecting Plaid.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified yet — that's worth knowing before you connect a primary operating account. Plaid uses read-only bank access; Starch cannot initiate transactions. If compliance requirements are a hard constraint today, that's an honest reason to wait.

The QuickBooks P&L report would give me cleaner expense categories than raw Plaid transactions. Can I use that?

QuickBooks report views (P&L, Transaction List, Vendor Expenses) are temporarily unavailable in Starch while an upstream fix is in progress. Entity-level data — bills, invoices, vendors, payments, journal entries — syncs normally, so you can build expense categories from that. The report views are on the roadmap to re-enable.

How often does the model update? I don't want to be looking at week-old numbers when I'm about to make a hire.

Stripe and Plaid both sync on a schedule — typically daily — so your baseline reflects recent actuals rather than a point-in-time export. You can also manually trigger a refresh before a board call or a decision meeting if you want to confirm the numbers are current.

I use Harvest for time tracking and Float for resource planning. Can Starch pull utilization data into the scenario model?

Harvest and Float are reachable from Starch's integration catalog of 3,000+ apps; the agent queries them live when your app runs. You could build a custom surface that combines Harvest utilization data with your Stripe and Plaid financial baseline — describe what you want and Starch assembles it. There's no pre-built template for this combination today, but it's a straightforward custom build.