Investor Relations

How to send a monthly investor update as Small Investor Relations Teams

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

Your two-person IR team spends the last week of every month hunting down the same five numbers. Someone pulls Stripe MRR, someone else exports a QuickBooks P&L, and both of you spend Tuesday afternoon reconciling why they don't match. Then you write a narrative in Google Docs, paste in a screenshot of the bank balance from Plaid, and argue over whether last month's burn was $380K or $410K depending on which timing convention your CFO prefers. By Thursday you've sent a draft to the GP, who changes the tone. By Friday the update is late and three LPs have already emailed asking when it's coming. This happens every single month, and the institutional tools that were supposed to solve it — Juniper Square, Addepar, iLevel — assume you have a dedicated IR-ops analyst to babysit them.

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

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live Investor Reporting app that pulls MRR from Stripe, cash movements from Plaid, and accounting entries from QuickBooks or NetSuite on a schedule — so your numbers are consistent before you write a single word

An automated monthly update generator that drafts the narrative, formats charts, and emails the finished update to your LP list on a cadence you set — without a two-day assembly process

A Runway Analysis dashboard that shows net burn, cash on hand, and months of runway in real time, so every LP question about capital pacing has a defensible, up-to-date answer behind it

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

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Stripe data on a schedule (MRR, new ARR, invoices, subscriptions) and your Plaid bank feeds on a schedule (transactions, balances, categorized spend). For QuickBooks or NetSuite, Starch syncs your accounting entities — bills, invoices, payments, journal entries, balance sheets — on a schedule. Gmail is also synced on a schedule so the Email Triage app can act on incoming LP messages. LinkedIn is connected for enrichment of your investor CRM contacts. If your LP portal lives in DocSend, Intralinks, or a similar web-based data room, Starch automates it through your browser — no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Build me a monthly investor update that pulls MRR and new ARR from Stripe, net burn from Plaid bank transactions, and expense line items from QuickBooks. Draft a three-paragraph narrative covering top wins, key risks, and runway. Match the professional but direct tone of the attached update from last quarter. Email the finished report to my LP distribution list on the first Monday of each month.

Build me a burn and runway dashboard that combines Stripe revenue with Plaid cash outflows to calculate net burn each month for the last six months, projects forward 24 months at three burn scenarios (flat, +10%, -10%), and shows a waterfall of our top five expense categories. I want this updating daily without manual input.

Set up email triage so that any incoming message from an LP asking about capital calls, commitment pacing, or J-curve questions gets flagged as high priority, summarized in one sentence, and drafted a reply pulling relevant numbers from our runway dashboard.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Stripe (scheduled sync): Starch pulls MRR, ARR, invoice history, and subscription data on a daily schedule. This becomes the revenue spine of every investor update — no more manual Stripe exports.

2 Connect Plaid (scheduled sync): Starch syncs your bank transactions and balances so net burn is calculated from actual cash movements, not from a spreadsheet someone built three CFOs ago.

3 Connect QuickBooks or NetSuite (scheduled sync): Starch pulls bills, invoices, payments, vendors, and journal entries. This is what reconciles your cash-basis Plaid view against your accrual books — so the GP and the LP see the same burn number.

4 Install the Investor Reporting app from the Starch App Store and tell it your LP list, your preferred cadence (first Monday of the month), and your narrative style. Paste in a prior update as a tone reference.

5 Install the Runway Analysis app and configure the three burn scenarios you want modeled — flat trend, upside case, and downside case. The dashboard goes live with current numbers and starts updating daily.

6 Set up the Email Triage app on your Gmail, telling Starch which sender domains are LPs and what question categories (capital calls, pacing, distributions, J-curve) should trigger a high-priority flag and auto-drafted reply.

7 At month close, open the Investor Reporting app and answer the four or five questions Starch surfaces: biggest win this period, key risk to flag, any personnel or product news worth including, anything you want to emphasize differently from last month.

8 Review the AI-drafted narrative and charts. The burn, MRR, and runway numbers are already populated from live syncs — you're editing tone and adding context, not hunting down figures.

9 Approve and send, or schedule for the cadence you set in step 4. Starch emails the finished update to your LP list directly.

10 If an LP replies with a follow-up question, the Email Triage app surfaces it with a one-sentence summary and a draft reply that pulls current runway numbers. You review and send with one click.

11 For LP data room access requests (DocSend, Intralinks, or similar web portals), tell Starch to automate the provisioning workflow through your browser — it can log in, add the contact, and send the access link without you touching the portal.

12 At quarter end, use the Investor Reporting app to extend the same data into a quarterly LP letter by describing the additional sections you need — portfolio company KPIs, capital account statements, vintage year comparisons — and Starch builds the expanded report on top of the same data connections.

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

Q1 2026 Monthly Close — March 2026 LP Update

Sample numbers from a real run

MRR (Stripe, end of March)	1,240,000
Net new ARR added in March	87,000
Gross cash burn (Plaid, March outflows)	412,000
Net burn after revenue (Stripe collections)	198,000
Cash on hand (Plaid balance, March 31)	9,800,000
Implied runway at current net burn	49

On March 28, your team opens the Investor Reporting app. Stripe has synced automatically and shows $1.24M MRR, up $87K net new ARR from the prior month — the expansion from two enterprise accounts closed March 12 is already in the numbers. Plaid shows $412K in gross cash outflows for March; after Stripe collections, net burn is $198K, meaningfully below the $240K monthly average from Q4. The Runway Analysis dashboard has already updated: $9.8M cash on hand, 49 months of runway at current pace. Starch drafts the March narrative: three paragraphs covering the enterprise expansion, the below-trend burn driven by a delayed engineering hire, and the product launch risk flagged for Q2. Your IR partner edits two sentences to soften the language around the delayed hire. The update is approved and scheduled for 8am Monday. Two LPs reply Tuesday asking about the Q2 capital call timeline. Email Triage flags both as high priority, summarizes each as 'asking about capital call date and expected draw size,' and drafts a reply citing the current runway figures. You send both replies before 9am without opening a spreadsheet.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Monthly net burn (cash-basis from Plaid vs. accrual from QuickBooks/NetSuite — and whether the two reconcile)

MRR and net new ARR by month, trailing six months (from Stripe)

Months of runway at flat burn, upside, and downside scenarios

LP update on-time rate — how many months in the last twelve did the update go out within five business days of month close

Median LP response time to capital call notices (tracked via Gmail sync)

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Juniper Square

Purpose-built for fund administration and LP portal management, but starts at $50K+/year, assumes a dedicated IR-ops analyst, and doesn't generate narrative updates — you're still writing the letter yourself.

Addepar

Best-in-class for portfolio performance analytics across asset classes, but it's a data warehouse with a reporting layer, not a workflow tool — you need a full implementation and ongoing admin to get monthly updates out of it.

Google Docs + Stripe CSV + QuickBooks export

Zero cost and full control, but every update takes two days, the burn number depends on which export your CFO ran last, and version history in Docs is not an audit trail your LP will accept at due diligence.

Q4 IR platform

Strong for public-company IR and earnings communications, but designed for dedicated IR teams at larger companies — the per-seat cost and implementation overhead don't fit a two-person team running mixed workflows.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — investor reporting, runway analysis, founder inbox 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

Does Starch actually reconcile Plaid cash-basis burn with our QuickBooks accrual entries, or does it just show both separately?

Starch syncs both data sources on a schedule and surfaces them in your Investor Reporting and Runway Analysis apps. The reconciliation view — showing cash-basis vs. accrual burn side by side — is something you describe to Starch and it builds into your dashboard. It won't automatically flag a discrepancy unless you tell it to, but you can write a prompt like 'alert me when Plaid net burn for the month is more than 15% different from QuickBooks net income for the same period' and it will.

We use NetSuite, not QuickBooks. Does that work?

Yes. Starch syncs your NetSuite data on a schedule — invoices, expenses, journal entries, balance sheets, and income statements. The Investor Reporting app is built to pull from either QuickBooks or NetSuite, and the data model is the same either way.

Note that QuickBooks P&L and Transaction List report views are temporarily unavailable — is the core accounting data still accessible?

Yes. The scheduled sync for QuickBooks covers entity-level data — bills, invoices, vendors, payments, and journal entries — and that's what the Investor Reporting and Runway Analysis apps use to calculate burn and format updates. The specific QuickBooks report views (pre-built P&L summary, Transaction List) are temporarily disabled pending a connector fix, but the underlying accounting data syncs normally. Most LP updates are built from entity-level data anyway, not from QuickBooks report exports.

Can Starch email the monthly update directly to our LP list, or do we still have to send from our own email client?

The Investor Reporting app sends the finished update from your Gmail account, which Starch connects to on a scheduled sync. You set the LP distribution list once. The app handles the send on whatever cadence you choose — you can also override and send manually any time.

We store our LP data room in DocSend. Can Starch interact with it?

DocSend doesn't have a public API, but Starch automates it through your browser — no API needed. You can build a workflow that logs into DocSend, provisions a new contact with viewer access, and sends the access link — triggered manually or by an incoming LP email.

Is Starch SOC 2 Type II certified? Our LPs will ask.

Not yet. Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. If your LP due diligence process requires a SOC 2 report before granting a vendor access to financial data, that's a real constraint worth knowing upfront. It's on the roadmap.

We want to track LP commitments, pacing against target, and J-curve data over multiple vintages. Can Starch build that?

You can build a custom commitment tracker in Starch by describing the data model you need: vintage year, committed capital, called capital, remaining unfunded commitment, DPI, RVPI. If your source of truth for those figures is QuickBooks journal entries, NetSuite, or a spreadsheet in Google Sheets (queryable live from Starch's integration catalog), Starch can pull from it. For LP portal systems like Juniper Square or iLevel that don't have public APIs, Starch can automate the data extraction through your browser.