Finance & FP&A

How to track ar aging and run collections as Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators

Finance & FP&AFor Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

You close every cohort thinking you'll sort out who still owes money 'after the launch chaos settles.' Six weeks later you're staring at a Stripe dashboard that shows gross revenue, a spreadsheet you built at 11pm listing which students paid in full vs. on a payment plan, and a Gmail inbox where three people swear they never got a payment reminder. Kajabi and Teachable don't have real AR aging views. Xero or QuickBooks might, but you're not a bookkeeper and you opened QuickBooks twice in 2024. The result: you consistently underestimate your actual collected revenue, carry 90-day-old receivables you forgot about, and write off balances you could have recovered with one more follow-up email.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Finance & FP&AFor Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live AR aging dashboard that pulls directly from Stripe — showing every open installment, how many days past due it is, and which students are on which payment plan — updated daily without a spreadsheet in sight.

Automated collections sequences: a follow-up email drafted by Starch and queued in Gmail the moment a payment fails or a 30-day milestone is crossed, so you never forget to chase an invoice.

A spending and cash-position layer from Plaid so you know, in the same view, what's owed to you and what's going out — useful the week before you pay contractors or renew your course platform.

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

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Stripe data on a schedule — charges, customers, invoices, subscriptions, and payouts — so the AR aging view is always current without a manual export. Starch also syncs your bank transaction data through Plaid on a schedule for the spending layer. Gmail is connected as a scheduled-sync provider so Starch can read existing threads, identify prior payment conversations, and queue outbound follow-up drafts for your one-click review. Kajabi or Teachable payment and enrollment data can be pulled live from Starch's integration catalog if you connect them, or Starch can automate those portals through your browser if a direct connection isn't available.

Prompts to copy

Build me an AR aging dashboard from my Stripe data. Show every customer with an outstanding balance, grouped by 0-30 days, 31-60 days, 61-90 days, and 90+ days past due. Include their name, the original charge amount, what's been collected so far, and what's still open. Flag anyone whose last payment attempt failed.

Every Monday morning, check Stripe for any payment plan installments that failed or are more than 14 days overdue. Draft a follow-up email to each person, use a friendly but direct tone, include a link to update their payment method, and queue the drafts in Gmail for my review before sending.

Show me a month-over-month spending breakdown from my connected bank accounts. Flag any vendor charge above $500 that didn't appear in the prior month, and list all active subscriptions so I can see my fixed overhead before I calculate what I actually cleared this cohort.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Stripe: Starch syncs your charges, subscriptions, invoices, and customers on a schedule. This takes about two minutes from the Starch connections panel and requires no CSV exports ever again.

2 Connect Plaid: link your business checking account so Starch can sync transactions daily. This gives you the expense side of the picture alongside your receivables.

3 Connect Gmail: Starch syncs your inbox so it can read payment-related threads, identify which students you've already emailed about a missed payment, and draft contextually accurate follow-ups — not generic templates.

4 Start from the Runway Analysis app in the Starch App Store: it already combines Stripe revenue and Plaid transactions into a burn-and-cash view. Fork it and add an AR aging table on top by describing what you want.

5 Describe your AR aging view in plain language — something like: 'Show me every Stripe customer with an open balance, bucketed by days overdue, with their last payment date and total collected so far.' Starch builds the table from your synced Stripe data.

6 Tell Starch which payment plan structures you use — for example, 'my signature course is a 3-pay plan at $597 each, billed monthly' — so it can correctly calculate remaining balances vs. amounts that are genuinely late.

7 Set up the Monday AR review automation: Starch checks Stripe for failed charges or overdue installments each Monday morning, cross-references Gmail to avoid re-contacting someone you emailed in the last seven days, and surfaces a short list with draft follow-ups ready for your approval.

8 Review the Transaction Insights dashboard after the first sync. Flag any recurring charges (software subscriptions, Zoom, your course platform fees) and mark them as known overhead so anomaly alerts don't fire on expected costs.

9 At the end of each cohort launch, run the prompt: 'Summarize this month's Stripe revenue, how much has been collected on payment plans vs. paid in full, and what's still outstanding. Compare to last cohort.' Starch pulls this from synced data in seconds.

10 If a student's installment is 90+ days overdue and you've sent two follow-ups, have Starch draft a final notice email and log the amount as a potential write-off in a Notion database you can reference at tax time — Starch syncs Notion on a schedule.

11 Review your full AR position monthly: open balances, collection rate by cohort, and average days-to-collect. Over two or three cohorts you'll see clearly whether your payment plan terms need tightening or your follow-up cadence needs to start earlier.

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

February 2026 Cohort Close — 'Teach to Thrive' 8-Week Program

Sample numbers from a real run

Paid in full (47 students × $997)	46,859
3-pay plan collected — installment 1 of 3 (31 students × $397)	12,307
3-pay plan outstanding — installments 2+3 (31 students × $794)	24,614
Failed payment — 4 students (installment 1)	1,588
Stripe fees (approx. 2.9% + $0.30)	-1,731

You launched 'Teach to Thrive' on February 3rd with 78 students enrolled. Forty-seven paid in full; thirty-one chose the 3-pay plan. By February 28th, Starch's AR aging dashboard showed $24,614 still outstanding across installments 2 and 3 — those aren't late, just future-dated — plus $1,588 from four students whose first payment failed. Without Starch, those four would have sat in Stripe's 'failed' filter, which you might check monthly if you remember. Instead, Starch queued four follow-up drafts in Gmail by Monday morning, personalized with each student's name and a link to update their card. Three of the four resolved within 48 hours; one became a genuine write-off logged to your Notion accounting notes. Net collected at 30 days: $57,435 of a possible $59,023 — a 97.3% collection rate. The prior cohort, before Starch, was closer to 91% because two payment plan students ghosted after installment 1 and you didn't notice until 60 days had passed.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Collection rate by cohort: percentage of total enrolled revenue actually collected within 60 days

AR aging distribution: dollar value sitting in 0-30 / 31-60 / 61-90 / 90+ day buckets at month-end

Failed payment recovery rate: how many failed Stripe charges are recovered after a follow-up vs. written off

Average days to collect on payment plans: benchmark against your standard net-30 or net-60 installment schedule

Fixed overhead as a percentage of cohort revenue: course platform fees, Zoom, email tool, contractor pay — tracked in Plaid so you know your real margin per launch

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Stripe Dashboard alone

Stripe shows charge status but has no AR aging grouping, no cross-referencing with your email history, and no automated follow-up — you're still doing the triage manually.

QuickBooks or Xero

Real AR aging reports exist here, but they require your books to be reconciled and up to date, which for a solo educator usually means waiting on your bookkeeper or learning double-entry accounting yourself.

Kajabi or Teachable native reporting

Enrollment and completion data lives here, but payment plan aging, failed charge tracking, and collections follow-up are not built-in features — you're exporting CSVs and managing follow-up from Gmail manually.

A Google Sheet with Stripe CSV exports

Works until you have 80+ students on varied payment plans, at which point the manual reconciliation each week costs more time than it saves and the error rate climbs.

Dedicated collections software (e.g., invoice tools built for agencies)

Overkill for a course business and not designed for subscription or installment payment structures common in cohort-based courses; adds another monthly fee and another tool to learn.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — runway analysis, transaction insights, 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 work if my students pay through Kajabi's native checkout, not Stripe directly?

If Kajabi routes payments through Stripe under the hood — which it does for most setups — Starch picks them up through the Stripe sync. If Kajabi uses its own payment processor for some transactions, Starch can automate your Kajabi admin portal through your browser to pull that data. No Kajabi API required.

Can Starch actually send the follow-up emails, or does it just draft them?

Starch drafts the follow-ups and queues them in Gmail for your one-click review. You stay in control of what goes out — it doesn't send autonomously unless you set it up that way and explicitly confirm. For collections emails especially, most founders want a quick eye on the draft before it hits a paying student's inbox.

I use a 6-pay plan, not a 3-pay. Can Starch model that?

Yes. When you describe your AR aging app to Starch, tell it your payment plan structure — 'my course has a 6-installment plan at $199/month' — and it will calculate expected vs. collected amounts accordingly from your Stripe subscription and invoice data.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I'm connecting bank and payment data.

Not yet — Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified at this time. That's worth knowing before you connect sensitive financial accounts. It's on the roadmap. If SOC 2 is a hard requirement for your institution or enterprise clients, that's an honest reason to wait.

What if I want to see AR aging alongside my course completion data — like, which overdue students are also disengaged in the course?

That's a cross-connection workflow Starch is well-suited for. If your completion data lives in Notion or a Google Sheet, Starch syncs both. If it's inside Kajabi or Teachable, Starch can pull it live from Starch's integration catalog or via browser automation. Then you describe the combined view — 'show me students with an overdue balance who have completed fewer than 3 modules' — and Starch builds it.

My QuickBooks has a P&L but the transaction detail is always stale. Can Starch replace that?

Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule — invoices, bills, vendors, payments, and journal entries. Note: QuickBooks' report views like P&L and Transaction List are temporarily unavailable through the sync while an upstream issue is being fixed, but the entity-level data comes through fine. Combined with Plaid transactions, you get a live spending picture that's usually more current than waiting for your books to close.