Finance & FP&A

How to track ar aging and run collections as DTC Brand Founders

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

You shipped a big wholesale order to a boutique chain in February and it's now April — the invoice is sitting unpaid and you found out by accident when you were reconciling a Google Sheet. Your AR tracking lives across QuickBooks line items, a Shopify order export you ran three weeks ago, and a Slack message you sent your ops person that nobody replied to. You don't have a collections process; you have a vague anxiety that someone owes you money. For a DTC brand doing six or seven figures, even 30 days of float on a $20K invoice is the difference between hitting your next inventory PO or putting it on a card.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

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

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live AR aging dashboard that pulls from QuickBooks and Stripe so you always know which invoices are current, 30+, 60+, and 90+ days out — no manual export required

An automated collections email sequence that drafts and sends follow-up messages to overdue accounts on a schedule, with your tone and your brand voice, via your Gmail

A weekly digest slacked to you every Monday with total AR outstanding, who's most overdue, and what follow-up went out the prior 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

Runway Analysis Transaction Insights Email Agent

Data sources & config

Starch connects directly to QuickBooks (scheduled sync — invoices, payments, vendors, and journal entries refresh automatically) and Stripe (scheduled sync — charges, payouts, and disputes). Gmail is connected via scheduled sync so the collections automation can read threads and send follow-up emails in your name. Slack is connected via scheduled sync to deliver the weekly digest. Transaction Insights pulls from Plaid (scheduled sync) for bank-level confirmation of what's actually cleared.

Prompts to copy

Build me an AR aging dashboard that pulls from QuickBooks — show me invoices grouped by 0–30, 31–60, 61–90, and 90+ days overdue, with customer name, invoice number, amount, and days outstanding. Flag any invoice over $5,000 that's been open more than 45 days.

Set up an automation that checks my QuickBooks every Monday morning, identifies invoices that are 30+ days overdue, drafts a polite but firm collection email for each one using my Gmail, and sends me a Slack summary of who was contacted and what was sent.

Show me all Stripe charges that didn't convert to settled payouts — flag anything disputed, refunded, or pending over 7 days, and add a line for net cash I can actually count on this month.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect QuickBooks via Starch's scheduled sync — invoices, payments, bills, and vendor data start populating automatically within minutes of connecting.

2 Connect Stripe via Starch's scheduled sync — charges, disputes, and payout data feed into the same workspace so you can reconcile invoice-level revenue against actual bank deposits.

3 Connect Plaid via Starch's scheduled sync to bring in your bank transactions as a ground-truth check against what QuickBooks and Stripe are reporting.

4 Connect Gmail via Starch's scheduled sync so the collections automation has access to your inbox — it can read prior threads with a customer before drafting follow-up, so the email doesn't read like a form letter.

5 Connect Slack from Starch's integration catalog so your weekly AR digest lands where you already live, not in another dashboard you have to remember to open.

6 Tell Starch to build your AR aging dashboard: describe the aging buckets you want, the dollar threshold for flagging, and whether you want it to pull customer contact info from QuickBooks or cross-reference your CRM.

7 Tell Starch to build a collections automation: specify the trigger (invoice age), the cadence (first follow-up at 30 days, second at 45, escalation call flag at 60), the tone (your actual brand voice — 'friendly but direct'), and whether to BCC you or log to a Notion page.

8 Review the first batch of drafted collection emails Starch surfaces — edit any that need a personal touch, approve the rest, and let the automation handle future sends on schedule.

9 Use Transaction Insights to cross-check your Plaid bank feed against expected AR collections — if QuickBooks shows an invoice as paid but your bank doesn't show a deposit, that's a flag worth catching early.

10 Start your Monday with the Slack digest: total AR outstanding by aging bucket, any new 60+ day invoices that crossed the threshold, and a log of every collection email sent the prior week.

11 For any account that reaches 90 days with no response, tell Starch to draft an escalation email with a payment link and flag it in your dashboard as 'escalation required' — at that point you decide whether to involve a collections agency or write it off.

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

April 2026 AR Sweep — $47,200 Outstanding

Sample numbers from a real run

Boutique chain (wholesale, Net 30)	18,500
Regional retailer #2 (wholesale, Net 30)	11,200
Pop-up event organizer (Net 15)	6,400
E-comm marketplace payout (in transit)	7,300
Subscription bundle — disputed Stripe charge	3,800

It's April 7. The Starch AR aging dashboard shows $47,200 outstanding across five accounts. The boutique chain invoice for $18,500 hit 38 days ago — it crossed the 30-day threshold two days ago and the collections automation already sent a first follow-up email at 6am Monday with a copy of the original invoice attached. You didn't touch it. The regional retailer at $11,200 is at 22 days — still current, no action triggered. The pop-up event organizer at $6,400 is 48 days out; the second follow-up goes out Friday automatically, and Starch will flag it for a personal call from you if it hits 60 days with no reply. The $7,300 marketplace payout shows in your Plaid bank feed as 'pending' — Transaction Insights flagged it as outside the normal 3–5 day window and surfaced it in your Monday digest. The $3,800 disputed Stripe charge shows in your Stripe scheduled sync as 'under review'; Starch added it to the dashboard and drafted a response email pulling in the customer's original order confirmation from Gmail. You resolved three of these five before your first team standup.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) — your target is under 35 days; right now you're averaging 42

AR aging mix — what percentage of open invoices are 60+ days (anything over 15% is a cash flow problem for a DTC brand)

Collection rate on 30-day overdue invoices — how many resolve after a first automated follow-up vs. requiring escalation

Disputed or unreconciled Stripe charges as a percentage of monthly GMV

Net cash collectible this month — total AR minus disputes, minus invoices with no payment activity in 45+ days

Comparison

What this replaces

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

QuickBooks Accounts Receivable reports alone

QuickBooks shows you the aging report but does nothing to act on it — you still have to manually draft and send every collection email, track replies in your inbox, and remember to check back.

Chaser or YayPay (dedicated AR automation tools)

Purpose-built for collections workflows but add another monthly SaaS bill, don't connect to your Stripe or Plaid data, and can't pull email thread history the way Starch does through Gmail.

Google Sheets + manual invoice tracking

Free and flexible but decays immediately — someone forgets to update it after a payment comes in and you're back to not knowing what's actually outstanding.

Xero + Hubdoc

Solid bookkeeping stack if you're on Xero instead of QuickBooks, but Starch connects to Xero from its integration catalog, so you don't have to choose — Xero stays your source of truth and Starch reads from it.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — runway analysis, transaction insights, 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

Does Starch actually send collection emails from my Gmail account, or does it send from some generic address?

It sends from your connected Gmail account. Starch syncs your Gmail on a schedule and can read prior threads with a contact before drafting follow-up, so the email looks like it came from you — because it did. The Gmail OAuth consent screen currently shows the underlying connector's name rather than Starch; a Starch-verified client is on the roadmap.

Can Starch pull AR data if I'm on Xero instead of QuickBooks?

Yes. Xero is available through Starch's integration catalog — connect it and the agent queries your invoices and payments live when your AR dashboard or automation runs. QuickBooks gets a deeper scheduled sync (data refreshes automatically and lives in Starch); Xero is queried live on demand. For most AR aging use cases the live query is fast enough.

What happens if a customer pays and QuickBooks updates — does the collection automation know to stop?

Yes. The automation checks QuickBooks invoice status before sending each follow-up. If an invoice moved to 'paid' since the last sync, it skips the email. Because QuickBooks is a scheduled-sync provider, the data refreshes automatically — you're not manually telling Starch that a payment came in.

I do mostly Shopify direct-to-consumer — I don't have a lot of wholesale invoices. Is this useful for me?

Partially. If your AR is almost entirely Shopify orders paid at checkout, you don't have an aging problem in the traditional sense. Where this becomes valuable is tracking disputed Stripe charges, marketplace payouts in transit, and any B2B or wholesale revenue lines. The Transaction Insights app is probably more immediately useful for DTC-pure brands — it shows where your Plaid-connected cash is actually going versus what Stripe is telling you.

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

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified yet. That's worth knowing before you connect financial data. There's no self-hosted option either. If SOC 2 is a hard requirement for your business, that's a real constraint — we'd rather you know now than find out later.

Can Starch also handle the other side — tracking what I owe to vendors, not just what's owed to me?

Yes. QuickBooks syncs bills and vendor data along with invoices, so you can build an AP dashboard alongside your AR dashboard. Tell Starch: 'Show me all open bills in QuickBooks grouped by due date, vendor, and amount — flag anything due in the next 7 days.' It builds it from the same connection.