Finance & FP&A

How to track ar aging and run collections as CPG Founders

Finance & FP&AFor CPG Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Your AR aging is a mess of QuickBooks reports, broker remittance PDFs, and a spreadsheet someone built two years ago that nobody fully trusts. Distributors like UNFI and KeHE take 60-90 days to pay, deduct spoilage and slotting fees without warning, and your bookkeeper tells you what's overdue once a month — by which time a $15k invoice has been sitting unpaid for 45 days with no follow-up. You don't have an AR clerk. You don't have a collections person. The founder chases the invoices, which means collections emails get written at 10pm or not at all. Meanwhile, you're making production decisions based on a cash picture that's 6 weeks stale.

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Finance & FP&AFor CPG Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live AR aging dashboard that pulls from QuickBooks, shows every overdue invoice by distributor or retailer, and tells you total exposure by aging bucket (0-30, 31-60, 61-90, 90+) without waiting for month-end close

An automated collections workflow that drafts and sends follow-up emails for overdue accounts on a schedule — first notice at 30 days, escalation at 60 — with summaries sent to your Slack so you're always aware of what went out

A cash flow view that connects AR expected receipts to your live burn rate, so you know whether that $28k UNFI check landing next week is already reflected in your runway projection

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

Runway Analysis Email Agent Transaction Insights

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule (invoices, payments, vendors, customers — entity-level data refreshed daily). Starch syncs your Plaid bank transactions on a schedule for cash position. Gmail is connected so the email agent can draft and send collections follow-ups from your actual inbox. Slack is connected from Starch's integration catalog so the agent queries it live to post weekly AR summaries. Note: QuickBooks report views (P&L, Transaction List) are temporarily disabled — but entity-level invoice and payment data syncs normally, which is what the AR aging dashboard uses.

Prompts to copy

Build me an AR aging dashboard from my QuickBooks data. Show every open invoice grouped by customer — UNFI, KeHE, Whole Foods regional, and DTC accounts — sorted by days outstanding. Add aging buckets: 0–30, 31–60, 61–90, and 90+. Flag anything over 60 days in red. Refresh daily.

Every Monday morning, look at my QuickBooks open invoices. For any invoice that's been open more than 30 days, draft a polite collections follow-up email addressed to the accounts payable contact on the invoice. For anything over 60 days, draft a firmer escalation. Send me a Slack summary of what you drafted before anything goes out.

Show me my cash position from Plaid alongside expected AR inflows from QuickBooks — grouped by estimated payment date. Flag any week where collections shortfall would push my runway below 6 months at current burn.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect QuickBooks to Starch — Starch syncs your invoices, payments, customers, and vendors on a schedule. This is the source of truth for your AR aging. Entity-level data refreshes daily so you're not waiting for your bookkeeper to pull a report.

2 Connect Plaid — Starch syncs your bank transactions on a schedule. This gives you the actual cash side: when checks clear, what your real balance looks like day-to-day, and whether AR projections are matching reality.

3 Connect Gmail — the Email Agent sends collections follow-ups from your actual inbox, so replies land in your thread and don't look like they came from a third-party tool.

4 Connect Slack from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live to post Monday morning AR summaries, so your collections status surfaces where you already work instead of requiring you to log into another dashboard.

5 Tell Starch: 'Build me an AR aging dashboard from QuickBooks open invoices, grouped by customer and aging bucket, refreshed daily.' Starch builds the app. You name which customers to prioritize — distributors, regional retailers, DTC — and the view organizes accordingly.

6 Set a Monday automation: 'Every Monday, pull all QuickBooks invoices open more than 30 days. Draft a follow-up email for each. For 60+ day invoices, escalate the tone. Show me the drafts in Slack before sending.' You review the queue, approve or edit, and the emails go out.

7 Review the first batch of drafts manually for the first two weeks. The agent learns your tone from your inbox history — after a few rounds of light edits, the drafts are largely send-ready.

8 Add a cash timing layer: 'Pull expected AR receipts from QuickBooks alongside my Plaid balance and project cash by week for the next 12 weeks.' This ties your collections pipeline to your runway number so you're not planning production spend against cash that might not arrive on time.

9 Flag deduction disputes: tell Starch to flag any QuickBooks invoice where the payment recorded is less than the invoice amount by more than 5%. CPG distributors deduct spoilage, freight damage, and unauthorized promotions routinely — catching these early is where you recover real money.

10 For disputed deductions, use the Email Agent to draft a dispute letter to the distributor's deductions team. Tell Starch: 'Draft a deduction dispute for invoice #4821 — KeHE deducted $1,200 against a $14,000 invoice with no supporting documentation. Reference our trade agreement terms.' The agent drafts; you review and send.

11 Once the system is running, check the Slack digest every Monday morning. It shows you: total open AR by aging bucket, what collections emails went out last week, any new invoices that crossed the 30-day mark, and your cash position vs. expected inflows. That's your weekly AR review — five minutes instead of ninety.

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 AR close — natural foods brand, ~$2.4M ARR

Sample numbers from a real run

UNFI Northeast — Invoice #3341 (62 days)	18,400
KeHE Midwest — Invoice #3298 (88 days)	14,750
Whole Foods Rocky Mountain (regional buyer) — Invoice #3410 (31 days)	9,200
Shopify wholesale portal — 4 invoices (0–28 days)	6,800
KeHE deduction dispute — Invoice #3201, underpaid by $1,100	-1,100

Heading into the Q1 close, this founder had $49,150 in open AR — $33,150 of it more than 30 days outstanding. The QuickBooks sync surfaced it in the Starch dashboard the same morning it crossed the threshold, rather than three weeks later when the bookkeeper would have flagged it. The Monday automation drafted follow-up emails to UNFI and KeHE that week; the KeHE invoice (88 days, no payment response after two prior nudges) got a firmer escalation noting the net payment terms in their trade agreement. The KeHE deduction dispute — $1,100 shorted against a March delivery — was caught because Starch flagged the payment-to-invoice mismatch automatically. The dispute letter referenced the original PO and delivery confirmation; KeHE credited it in the next remittance cycle. The cash timing view showed the founder that even with the two large distributor invoices outstanding, a $22k Plaid-confirmed receipt from UNFI on April 3rd plus the Shopify wholesale payments would keep the runway well above the 6-month threshold — meaning the production run planned for mid-April was safe to commit.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) — tracked by distributor channel separately because UNFI and KeHE have very different payment behavior

AR over 60 days as a % of total open AR — the number that tells you if your collections process is working

Deduction recovery rate — what % of flagged distributor deductions you successfully dispute and recover

Cash runway in weeks accounting for expected AR receipts, not just current bank balance

Collections email response rate — what % of follow-ups generate a payment or at least an acknowledgment within 7 days

Comparison

What this replaces

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

QuickBooks + manual aging report

You already have the data in QuickBooks, but pulling the aging report manually means it's stale the moment you export it — and QuickBooks won't send the follow-up email for you.

Apruve or Resolve (B2B AR automation)

Purpose-built for AR, but they work by inserting themselves into your payment flow as a net-terms provider — not useful when you're already net 30/60 with UNFI and trying to chase what you're already owed.

Bill.com

Strong for AP; AR module exists but is designed for invoice delivery, not for a CPG founder who needs distributor deduction tracking and automated follow-up drafts without paying for an AR automation seat.

Spreadsheet + calendar reminders

Free, and most CPG founders start here, but the follow-up emails require manual drafting every time and the aging view goes stale the moment a payment posts.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — runway analysis, email agent, transaction insights 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 pull QuickBooks invoice data in real time, or is there a lag?

Starch syncs your QuickBooks entity-level data — invoices, payments, customers — on a schedule (typically daily). It's not live-to-the-second, but for AR aging purposes a daily refresh is meaningfully better than waiting for a monthly bookkeeper report. One honest caveat: QuickBooks report views like P&L and Transaction List are temporarily disabled while an upstream connector fix is in progress. The AR aging dashboard uses entity-level invoice and payment data, which syncs normally — this limitation doesn't affect the workflow described here.

Will the collections emails actually go out automatically, or do I have to approve each one?

You control the approval step. The default setup drafts the emails and sends them to a Slack summary for your review before anything goes out. Once you're confident the drafts are consistently on-brand and accurate, you can tell Starch to send automatically for standard 30-day follow-ups and only surface the 60+ day escalations for manual review. Either way, you decide.

My distributors pay via ACH and the remittance comes in a PDF. Can Starch read those remittance PDFs to match payments to invoices?

If the remittance PDFs come as email attachments, the Email Agent can parse them and extract the payment details. You'd tell Starch: 'When I receive an email from UNFI with a remittance attachment, extract the invoice numbers and amounts paid and match them against my open QuickBooks invoices.' For remittances posted to a distributor portal you log into, Starch can automate that through your browser — no API needed — to pull the data directly.

Does Starch handle the deduction dispute tracking itself, or just the email drafts?

Starch catches the mismatch (payment less than invoice amount), drafts the dispute communication, and can track the dispute status in a custom app you describe. What it doesn't do today is integrate with distributor deduction portals like UNFI's KeHE Connect directly through a formal API — but it can automate those portals through your browser. If you want a formal deduction management workflow with a full dispute log, describe it to Starch and it will build the app.

I use Xero, not QuickBooks. Does this work?

Yes. Xero is available from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live when your AR app runs. The main difference is that Xero won't be a scheduled-sync provider the way QuickBooks is, meaning the data is pulled fresh each time the app runs rather than stored in Starch on a daily refresh cycle. For most AR aging use cases that's fine.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I'm nervous about connecting my bank and accounting data.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today — that's an honest limit worth naming. If SOC 2 certification is a hard requirement for your accounting or banking integrations, that's a real constraint to factor in. For founders who are comfortable with the current security posture, the data connections are via standard OAuth with the providers (Plaid, QuickBooks) rather than storing raw credentials.