Strategy & Planning

How to run a scenario analysis for a strategic decision as Small Finance Teams

Strategy & PlanningFor Small Finance Teams2 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Your 13-week cash model lives in a Google Sheet you rebuild every Friday by copying Stripe revenue into one tab, pasting Plaid transactions into another, and manually layering in the headcount plan you got from the CEO on Tuesday. When the CFO asks 'what happens to runway if we delay the next hire by two quarters and revenue comes in 15% below plan,' you open a new tab, duplicate the model, and start adjusting hardcoded cells. By the time you have three scenarios, you have three sheets, they've drifted from each other, and none of them reflect the QuickBooks close you just finished because you haven't updated the baseline yet. The board meeting is in nine days.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Strategy & PlanningFor Small Finance Teams2 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live-baseline scenario model that pulls actual revenue and burn from Stripe and Plaid automatically, so you're never modeling off last month's stale numbers

Side-by-side scenario comparisons — base, downside, and upside — each showing runway, net burn, and break-even, all driven by the same connected data so they can't drift apart

A repeatable workflow where the CFO or CEO can request a new scenario and you can have a grounded answer in under an hour instead of a half-day rebuild

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 payouts — and syncs your Plaid bank transactions and balances on a schedule. If your books live in QuickBooks, Starch syncs your QuickBooks invoices, bills, payments, vendors, and journal entries on a schedule as well. NetSuite income statements and balance sheets sync the same way. These scheduled syncs feed the baseline numbers so every scenario you build is running off the same live source of truth, not a manually pasted export.

Prompts to copy

Connect my Stripe and Plaid accounts and build a scenario analysis model. My base case is current revenue and burn trends. I want three scenarios: (1) base — current trajectory, (2) conservative — revenue 20% below plan and no new hires in Q3, (3) aggressive — raise a Series A in August and double headcount in Q4. For each scenario, show monthly runway, net burn rate, and the month we hit zero cash.

Build me a runway analysis dashboard using Stripe and Plaid that shows real net burn over the last six months and projects forward 18 months at the current burn rate. Flag any month where projected cash drops below two months of runway.

Add a fourth scenario to my existing scenario analysis: we delay the Series A by two quarters, reduce hiring by 60%, and cut software spend by $18k/month starting in July. Show how runway changes versus the base case.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Stripe and Plaid in Starch — both are scheduled-sync providers, so your revenue and bank transaction data refreshes automatically. If your month-end close lives in QuickBooks or NetSuite, connect those too; Starch syncs entity-level data on a schedule.

2 Open the Scenario Analysis app from the Starch App Store — this is the pre-built starting point. It pulls your actual Stripe revenue and Plaid burn to establish the baseline before you touch a single assumption.

3 Confirm the baseline looks right: net burn for the trailing three months, current cash balance from Plaid, and ARR or MRR trend from Stripe. If there are categorization issues, fix them in Starch before branching scenarios so every scenario inherits clean data.

4 Tell Starch the assumptions you want to test in plain language — specific hire dates, a price increase, a revenue miss, a fundraise timing change. You don't adjust cells; you describe the scenario and Starch models it.

5 Run your first scenario comparison: base versus one downside case. Look at runway month by month, the month net burn flips, and where break-even falls. Make sure the output passes your gut check against the Friday Sheet before adding more scenarios.

6 Add additional scenarios as separate branches — each one modifies only the assumptions you name, inheriting everything else from the connected baseline. This is how you keep three scenarios from drifting apart the way three copies of a spreadsheet always do.

7 Use the Runway Analysis app alongside the scenario model as a daily dashboard — it shows real net burn and 24-month projections at a glance, so you always know the current baseline without reopening the model.

8 When the CFO asks a new question mid-close-week — 'what if we cut contractor spend by $25k starting next quarter' — add it as a new scenario in Starch rather than duplicating a sheet. The new scenario stays connected to the same live Stripe and Plaid data.

9 Before the board meeting, pull the scenario outputs and use them to anchor the cash section of the board deck. If you need slides, the Presentation Agent app is currently in development and in beta — you can request access; otherwise export the scenario data and drop it into your existing board template.

10 After the board meeting, archive the scenarios you presented by giving them a date label so you can compare next quarter's actuals against what you projected. This is the audit trail your auditors and investors will eventually ask for.

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

Q2 2026 Fundraising Decision — June Scenario Run

Sample numbers from a real run

Stripe MRR (May actuals)	187,000
Plaid net cash burn (May actuals)	-94,000
Current cash balance (Plaid)	2,340,000
Implied runway — base case	24
Implied runway — Series A delayed to Q1 2027	14
Implied runway — double headcount Q3 + no raise	9

It's June 3rd and the CEO wants to decide before the board call whether to start the Series A process now or wait until Q1 when the product is further along. You have three hours. In the old world, you'd open the Friday Sheet, duplicate it twice, and start adjusting headcount rows. Instead, you open Starch's Scenario Analysis app. The Stripe sync shows $187k MRR for May; Plaid shows a net burn of $94k and a cash balance of $2.34M — about 24 months of runway at the current rate. You tell Starch: 'Create three scenarios. Base: current trajectory. Delay scenario: we wait until Q1 2027 to close a Series A, add two engineers in September, no other changes. Aggressive growth: we close the Series A in August, add five engineers and one sales hire in Q3, and revenue grows 25% by December.' Starch builds all three off the same Stripe and Plaid data. The delay scenario shows 14 months of runway — fine if the round closes on schedule, tight if it slips. The aggressive growth scenario shows runway dropping to 9 months before the Series A cash lands, with a $380k cash low in October that would require careful timing. You spend the remaining two hours stress-testing the October dip by adding a conservative revenue miss to the aggressive scenario. You walk into the board call with four grounded scenarios, all built off the same May actuals, none of them a copy of a copy of a spreadsheet.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Net burn rate (monthly, trailing 3-month average) — the number you defend to the board

Months of runway under each scenario — the decision-relevant output from every model run

Break-even month — which scenario gets you to cash-flow neutral and when

Cash balance at lowest projected point — the stress test number that tells you whether a scenario is viable

Scenario divergence vs. base — how many months of runway you gain or lose from each assumption change

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Sheets (manual 13-week model)

You own the build and the maintenance — every Stripe export, every QuickBooks download, every Friday update is manual labor that stops the moment you're in close week or on vacation; Starch keeps the baseline current without the copy-paste.

Excel + manual data pulls

More powerful formula engine if you need it, but the same problem: scenarios drift from each other and from actuals the moment the source data changes and you forget to update one tab.

Mosaic or Pigment (dedicated FP&A platforms)

Purpose-built for the scenario-modeling use case and strong for mid-market finance teams, but they're priced and scoped for teams larger than three people and require a meaningful onboarding investment before you get your first output.

QuickBooks or NetSuite built-in reports

Good at telling you what happened in the ledger; not built for forward-looking scenario branches or for combining bank data (Plaid) with revenue data (Stripe) in a single model.

Fathom or Spotlight Reporting

Clean reporting on top of QuickBooks actuals, but scenario modeling is limited — you're mostly looking backward, not building side-by-side forward projections with adjustable assumptions.

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

We close our books in NetSuite, not QuickBooks. Does Starch work for us?

Yes. Starch syncs your NetSuite invoices, expenses, journal entries, balance sheets, and income statements on a schedule. You connect NetSuite and Starch pulls the entity-level data automatically. Note that QuickBooks report views like the P&L summary are temporarily disabled pending a connector fix, but entity-level data — bills, invoices, vendors, payments — syncs normally for QuickBooks users too.

Our Plaid connection shows all our bank accounts mixed together. Can we isolate the operating account for burn calculations?

Yes. When you describe your scenario model to Starch, you can specify which Plaid account to use for the burn calculation. Tell Starch 'use only the Silicon Valley Bank operating account ending in 4821 for cash balance and outflow data' and the model will filter accordingly.

What happens to existing scenarios when Stripe or Plaid syncs new data?

The baseline updates with each sync, which means your base-case scenario reflects current actuals. Scenarios you've built on top of the baseline will recalculate against the updated numbers automatically. This is intentional — it keeps your scenarios grounded — but it means you should export or snapshot a scenario before a board meeting if you want a frozen record of what you presented.

Can I share a specific scenario with the CFO or CEO without giving them access to the whole model?

Starch apps can be shared with other users in your workspace. You can show the CFO the scenario output directly in Starch rather than exporting to a sheet. Fine-grained view-only sharing for external stakeholders (like a board member) is not a current feature — for that use case you'd export the output.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We have a CFO who will ask.

Not yet. Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified as of today. If that's a hard requirement for connecting your Stripe, Plaid, or NetSuite data, it's an honest reason to wait. It's on the roadmap.

We use Ramp and Bill.com for AP. Can those feed into the scenario model?

Ramp and Bill.com aren't in the scheduled-sync provider list, but Starch connects to 3,000+ apps through its integration catalog, plus any website through browser automation. Depending on what Ramp or Bill.com expose through their APIs, you can connect them from Starch's integration catalog and the agent will query them live when your model runs. For a scenario model, most teams find that Plaid bank transactions capture the actual cash outflows accurately enough that you don't need a separate AP feed — the money leaving the account is the money leaving the account.

How long does it take to get a first scenario model running?

If Stripe and Plaid are already connected, the Scenario Analysis app gives you a live baseline immediately. Adding your first scenario — telling Starch the assumptions in plain language — takes about ten minutes. Getting to three vetted scenarios with clean baselines typically takes one to two hours the first time, mostly spent confirming the baseline numbers look right against what you know from close.