Marketing & Growth

How to send a weekly marketing report as Small Finance Teams

Marketing & GrowthFor Small Finance Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Every Monday morning, one of your three-person team spends 90 minutes copy-pasting numbers from QuickBooks, Stripe, and Plaid into a Google Sheet, reformatting it, and emailing a summary to the CFO and department heads. The CFO wants gross margin by product line. The VP of Sales wants pipeline-to-revenue conversion. Marketing wants CAC. You're pulling from three different tools, none of which talk to each other, and by the time the report lands in inboxes it's already Tuesday. Nobody reads the spreadsheet attachment anyway. You need one report, sent automatically, that answers the questions people actually ask — without you touching it.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Marketing & GrowthFor Small Finance Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A weekly marketing and financial performance report that pulls live from Stripe, QuickBooks or NetSuite, and Plaid, then emails a formatted summary to stakeholders every Monday morning — no manual assembly.

A Growth Analyst app that monitors your PostHog traffic and conversion data and adds a weekly narrative — what changed, what's working, what to focus on — directly into the report.

A Starch automation that packages the data into a slide-ready format using Presentation Agent, so the CFO's weekly sync has an actual deck instead of a spreadsheet attachment.

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

Growth Analyst Investor Reporting Presentation Agent

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Stripe, Plaid, and QuickBooks data on a schedule — revenue, cash balances, invoices, AP and AR. For NetSuite shops, Starch syncs your NetSuite income statements and balance sheet on the same schedule. PostHog is connected from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live each Monday when the report runs. Gmail is a scheduled-sync provider — Starch uses it to send the final report. Presentation Agent (currently in development — request beta access) generates the slide deck output.

Prompts to copy

Every Monday at 7am, pull last week's Stripe revenue, Plaid cash balance, and QuickBooks AP and AR balances. Calculate gross margin, net burn, and days of runway. Email a plain-English summary to the CFO and finance team with those five numbers and a one-sentence flag if anything moved more than 10% week-over-week.

Connect PostHog and Gmail. Each Monday, summarize last week's signups, top referral sources, conversion rate changes by channel, and the three content pieces that drove the most activity. Include specific suggestions for what to test next week. Send it as a separate section in the same Monday report.

Take the Monday morning report data and generate a 5-slide summary deck: slide 1 is headline numbers (revenue, burn, runway), slide 2 is gross margin by product line, slide 3 is marketing funnel (signups to paid), slide 4 is cash position and AP/AR aging, slide 5 is the three things to focus on this week. Export as a shareable link and attach it to the Monday email.

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 Starch pulls your transaction data, balances, and payout history on a recurring schedule. No CSV exports, no manual refresh.

2 Connect QuickBooks or NetSuite. Starch syncs your invoices, bills, payments, vendors, and journal entries from QuickBooks (20+ entity types), or income statements and balance sheets from NetSuite, on the same schedule.

3 Connect PostHog from Starch's integration catalog. The agent queries it live each time the Monday automation runs — you get last week's numbers, not a stale snapshot.

4 Open the Growth Analyst starter app in the Starch App Store. It's pre-built to connect PostHog and Gmail; customize the digest sections to match what your CFO and department heads actually want to see.

5 Describe your financial summary to Starch in plain language: tell it which metrics to pull from which sources, what to flag when numbers move significantly, and who gets the email. Starch builds the automation.

6 Set the automation trigger to every Monday at 7am. Starch will pull the scheduled-sync data for Stripe, Plaid, and QuickBooks/NetSuite, query PostHog live, and assemble the report.

7 Test the report by running it manually the first time. Review the output, adjust the narrative framing or metric calculations by describing the change in natural language — no formulas to edit, no code.

8 Add a Presentation Agent step (currently in development — request beta access) to auto-generate a 5-slide deck from the same data each week, exported as a shareable link included in the Monday email.

9 Wire in a second automation: if gross margin drops more than 5 percentage points week-over-week, or cash runway drops below 10 weeks, Starch sends an immediate Slack alert to the CFO — not just the Monday report.

10 Share the Monday report template with the VP of Sales and VP of Marketing so they can fork it, add their own data sources from Starch's integration catalog, and own their section of the weekly readout.

11 At quarter-end, use the weekly report history to build the board pack. The data's already structured — describe the board slides to Starch and it assembles the deck from the same sources, not from a fresh round of copy-pasting.

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

Week of March 31, 2026 — Monday morning report

Sample numbers from a real run

Stripe net revenue (last 7 days)	48,200
Plaid operating cash balance	612,000
QuickBooks AR outstanding	94,500
QuickBooks AP due this week	31,200
Calculated runway at current burn	19
PostHog: new signups (last 7 days)	143
PostHog: trial-to-paid conversion rate	12

At 7:02am Monday, the report lands in the CFO's inbox. Stripe net revenue was $48,200 last week, down 6% from the prior week — Starch flags this because it crossed the 5% threshold you set. Plaid shows $612,000 in the operating account. QuickBooks AR has $94,500 outstanding, with $31,200 in AP due before Friday. Calculated runway at current burn is 19 weeks. The Growth Analyst section reports 143 new PostHog signups, a 12% trial-to-paid conversion rate (flat week-over-week), and calls out that the LinkedIn organic post from Wednesday drove 41% of signups — with a specific suggestion to run a paid version of that content this week. The attached slide deck has five slides ready for the CFO's 10am sync. Nobody touched a spreadsheet.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Net cash runway in weeks (Plaid balance ÷ weekly net burn from Stripe + QuickBooks)

Gross margin by product line (Stripe revenue minus COGS from QuickBooks, broken out by SKU or subscription tier)

AR aging: what percentage of outstanding receivables are 30+ days overdue

Trial-to-paid conversion rate week-over-week (PostHog)

Weekly revenue trend vs. prior 4-week average (Stripe)

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Sheets + manual export from QuickBooks/Stripe

You already know this one — 90 minutes every Monday, formulas that break when someone adds a row, and a spreadsheet attachment nobody opens.

Looker Studio (Google Data Studio)

Good for static dashboards, but it won't write the narrative, send the email, or generate the slide deck — you're still doing the assembly and distribution yourself.

Fathom or Mosaic (FP&A tools)

Purpose-built for financial reporting and strong at it, but they don't pull in your marketing funnel data (PostHog signups, conversion rate) or auto-generate the slides — you'd still be stitching two separate reports together.

Notion AI + manual data entry

Good for writing the narrative section, but Notion doesn't sync directly from Stripe, Plaid, or QuickBooks — someone still has to paste the numbers in before the AI can summarize them.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — growth analyst, investor reporting, presentation 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 use NetSuite, not QuickBooks. Does this work for us?

Yes. Starch syncs your NetSuite invoices, expenses, journal entries, balance sheets, and income statements on a schedule. You'd describe your report in the same way — just reference NetSuite as your source for P&L and balance sheet data instead of QuickBooks.

Can Starch calculate gross margin by product line, or does it just show totals?

You can describe exactly how you want it calculated. Tell Starch which Stripe product IDs or QuickBooks items map to which product lines, and how to define COGS from your chart of accounts. It builds that logic into the report. If your product-line mapping lives in a Google Sheet, you can connect Google Sheets from Starch's integration catalog and the agent queries it live as a reference table.

What happens if QuickBooks data is stale or the sync hasn't run yet when the report fires Monday morning?

Starch's QuickBooks sync runs on a schedule before your Monday automation. If there's a sync gap, the report will note the data freshness timestamp so the CFO knows when the numbers were last pulled — no silent stale data. One honest limit worth knowing: QuickBooks report views (the pre-built P&L and Transaction List views in QuickBooks itself) are temporarily unavailable in Starch pending a connector fix. Entity-level data — invoices, bills, vendors, payments, journal entries — syncs normally, so your report can be built from those entities directly.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We have a security review process.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If that's a hard requirement for connecting your QuickBooks, Stripe, or NetSuite data, that's a real constraint worth knowing upfront. It's on the roadmap.

Presentation Agent is 'currently in development' — what do we do for slides in the meantime?

The Monday report email with structured data sections works on its own for most weekly stakeholder syncs. For board decks and quarterly reviews, the Investor Reporting app is live today — it pulls from Stripe, QuickBooks, NetSuite, and Plaid and outputs structured financial data you can paste into your existing slide template in significantly less time than building from scratch. You can request beta access to Presentation Agent to be notified when it launches.

Can Starch send the report to different people with different sections — e.g., the CFO gets the full financial summary but the VP of Marketing only gets the PostHog section?

Yes. Describe the routing logic to Starch when you set up the automation: 'Send the full report to the CFO and finance team; send only the marketing funnel section to the VP of Marketing.' Starch builds that into the weekly run.

We don't use PostHog. Can the Growth Analyst section pull from Google Analytics or another source?

Google Analytics 4 is available from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live when the report runs. The Growth Analyst starter app is built around PostHog, but you can describe a custom version to Starch that pulls from GA4 instead — or both, if you track different things in each.