Investor Relations

How to send a monthly investor update as Small Finance Teams

Investor RelationsFor Small Finance Teams3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Your monthly investor update starts with a Tuesday afternoon export from NetSuite or QuickBooks, a separate Stripe MRR pull, a Plaid transaction dump, and whatever the CEO scribbled in a Notion doc after the last board call. You paste it all into a Google Sheet, build the narrative in a Google Doc, and spend Wednesday formatting it into something that looks like a company that has its act together. By the time it goes out — Thursday, sometimes Friday, sometimes the following week with an apology — you've spent six to eight hours on a document your investors will read in four minutes. And you'll do it again in 30 days.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Investor RelationsFor Small Finance Teams3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live Investor Reporting app that pulls MRR, net burn, runway, and cash balance directly from Stripe, QuickBooks or NetSuite, and Plaid — updated on a schedule, no manual exports.

An automated monthly email that drafts the narrative, formats charts and a burn/runway summary, and sends to your investor list on whatever cadence you set — with your numbers and your tone.

A Runway Analysis dashboard that gives the CFO and CEO a single place to check cash position daily, so one-off Slack messages like 'what's our runway?' get answered without interrupting close week.

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 Email Agent

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule (invoices, bills, payments, journal entries, vendor data), syncs your Stripe data on a schedule (charges, customers, subscriptions, payouts), and syncs your Plaid bank feed data on a schedule (categorized transactions and balances). Gmail is connected so Starch syncs your sent/received threads and can draft and send the investor update email directly. NetSuite is available as a scheduled-sync provider if your team runs NetSuite instead of QuickBooks — same entity-level data. All connections are set up from Starch; no manual CSV exports required.

Prompts to copy

Build me a monthly investor update that pulls MRR and net revenue from Stripe, operating expenses and headcount cost from QuickBooks, and cash balance from Plaid. Format it with a burn rate summary, a runway chart, top three wins this month, top two risks, and a competitive context paragraph. Send it to my investor list on the 5th of each month.

Build me a runway dashboard that shows net burn by month for the last six months, 24-month forward projection, and expense breakdown by QuickBooks class — and flag me on Slack if runway drops below 12 months.

Set up an email triage rule: when an investor replies to the monthly update, summarize their reply, draft a response based on the thread context, and remind me if I haven't replied within 48 hours.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect QuickBooks (or NetSuite) as a scheduled-sync provider in Starch. Starch will sync invoices, bills, payments, journal entries, vendor records, and class/department data — this is what replaces your Tuesday export.

2 Connect Stripe as a scheduled-sync provider. Starch syncs charges, customers, subscriptions, and payouts on a schedule so MRR and net revenue are live without a manual pull.

3 Connect Plaid as a scheduled-sync provider. Starch syncs your bank transactions and balances — this is your cash balance and expense categorization source, not a Plaid export you paste somewhere.

4 Open the Investor Reporting starter app from the Starch App Store. It's pre-wired for Stripe and Plaid and gives you a working template for burn rate, MRR, and runway narrative out of the box.

5 Fork the Investor Reporting app and customize it: add your QuickBooks class breakdown for operating expense detail, add your headcount cost line from payroll (if your team uses Paylocity or ADP, Starch syncs those too), and set the tone to match how you've written updates before.

6 Open the Runway Analysis starter app. Tell Starch to use your QuickBooks expense data for the burn calculation alongside Plaid cash balance — this gives you the 'correct number' the CFO actually wants, not the oversimplified average.

7 Set a monthly automation: on the 3rd of each month, Starch pulls the latest Stripe MRR, Plaid cash balance, and QuickBooks operating expenses, drafts the investor update narrative, and sends you a preview to review and edit before it goes out on the 5th.

8 Add Gmail as a scheduled-sync provider and enable the Email Agent. Configure it to watch for replies to the investor update thread, summarize each reply in one sentence, and draft a response you can send with one click.

9 Connect Slack from Starch's integration catalog so the agent queries it live and can post a runway alert — for example, a weekly Friday message with current cash balance, net burn month-to-date, and projected runway — to your #finance channel.

10 Tell Starch: 'Every Friday at 4pm, post to #finance-team: current Plaid cash balance, month-to-date net burn from QuickBooks and Stripe, and estimated months of runway at current pace.' This replaces the informal CEO Slack question mid-close.

11 Review the first automated draft before it sends. Starch matches the tone of your prior updates — you correct anything that's off, and those corrections inform the next draft. After two or three cycles it stops needing much editing.

12 Share the Runway Analysis dashboard link with the CFO and CEO as a read-only view. They get live runway and cash position without pinging you; you get back the hours you were spending answering one-off questions during close week.

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 Monthly Investor Update — Series A Portfolio Company, 200 Employees

Sample numbers from a real run

MRR (from Stripe subscriptions)	412,000
Net burn MTD (QuickBooks operating expenses minus Stripe revenue)	-187,000
Cash on hand (Plaid balance, March 31)	4,280,000
Runway at current burn (months)	22
Headcount cost (Paylocity sync, March payroll run)	310,000
G&A excluding payroll (QuickBooks class: G&A)	64,000
R&D spend (QuickBooks class: Engineering)	98,000

On April 3rd, Starch pulls the March 31 Plaid balance ($4.28M), the March Stripe MRR ($412K, up $18K from February), and the QuickBooks March actuals — $310K payroll from Paylocity sync, $98K engineering spend, $64K G&A. Net burn comes out to $187K. Starch drafts: 'March was a solid month. MRR reached $412K, up 4.6% from February, driven by two enterprise expansions that closed in the last week of the month. Net burn was $187K — $14K below February, mostly due to the AWS cost reduction project the engineering team completed. At current pace, runway is 22 months against our $4.28M cash balance. Top risk this quarter is the two enterprise deals in late-stage negotiation — if one slips to Q3, burn increases by approximately $40K/month. We'll have a clearer picture by mid-April.' Your finance team reviews the draft on the 4th, edits two sentences about the enterprise deal context, and it sends to 14 investors on the 5th. Total time: 20 minutes instead of seven hours.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Net burn per month (actual, not average) vs. board-approved budget

MRR and MRR growth rate month-over-month from Stripe

Runway in months at current burn rate, updated daily from Plaid + QuickBooks

Operating expense by department class (G&A, R&D, S&M) from QuickBooks

Days to send investor update after month-end close (target: by the 5th)

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Sheets + manual export + Google Slides

Your current stack: six to eight hours per update cycle, zero automation, and the deck is stale the moment it's sent because it's a snapshot not a live pull.

Mosaic or Cube (FP&A platforms)

Strong at financial modeling and board reporting, but they don't write the investor narrative, don't send the email, and cost $1,500-$3,000/month — hard to justify for a team of three at this stage.

Notion AI or Coda AI for narrative drafting

Good at writing, but you still have to manually pull numbers from NetSuite/QuickBooks/Stripe and paste them in — the data plumbing problem isn't solved.

Mailchimp or Substack for investor email delivery

Handles the send, not the data or the narrative; you still build the content by hand every month, and a finance team using Mailchimp for board communication is a setup that will eventually embarrass someone.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — investor reporting, runway analysis, email agent 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 run NetSuite, not QuickBooks. Does this still work?

Yes. Starch syncs NetSuite on a schedule — invoices, expenses, journal entries, balance sheets, and income statements. The Investor Reporting and Runway Analysis apps are compatible. The one thing to know: QuickBooks P&L and Transaction List report views are temporarily disabled pending a connector fix, but entity-level data (bills, invoices, vendors, journal entries) syncs normally. NetSuite doesn't have that limitation.

Our Stripe numbers are only part of the revenue picture — we also have professional services invoiced through QuickBooks. Can the update include both?

Yes. Tell Starch: 'Calculate total revenue as Stripe MRR plus QuickBooks invoice collections for the month, broken out by line.' The agent pulls both scheduled-sync sources and combines them. You describe how you want it calculated; Starch builds that calculation into the app.

We're not SOC 2 certified yet — is Starch?

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified. If that's a hard requirement from your investors or your own security review, that's worth knowing upfront. For a Series A finance team where the CFO and one or two analysts are the users, most teams find this acceptable — but it's an honest limit and we'd rather you know before you connect your NetSuite credentials.

Can Starch pull historical data so the first update has context, or does it only start from when we connect?

Starch's scheduled-sync providers pull history on initial sync — Google Calendar goes back 12 months, Stripe and Plaid pull available history, and QuickBooks syncs up to 50,000 records per entity type. For a first investor update, that means Starch has enough historical data to show six-month burn trends and MRR growth without you having to backfill anything manually.

What if our investors want a PDF, not an email?

Tell Starch: 'After drafting the update, generate a PDF version formatted as a one-page report and attach it to the investor email.' Starch can format the output as an attachment. If you want a specific template design, describe it — Starch builds the surface to match what you describe.

We have a board deck that goes out quarterly, not just a text email. Can this handle that?

The Investor Reporting app generates a formatted report with charts and narrative. It's not PowerPoint — it doesn't produce a .pptx file. If your board specifically expects slides, Starch drafts the content and you paste into your deck template. For monthly updates to a broader investor list, the formatted email report is usually a cleaner format anyway. The three-day quarterly board deck problem is a separate workflow — describe what you want to Starch and it'll build a custom surface for that too.