Internal Comms & Meetings

How to write an exec brief as Small Finance Teams

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Small Finance Teams3 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Every quarter, one person on your three-person team loses two to three days assembling the board package. You pull journal entries from NetSuite or QuickBooks into a Google Sheet, manually paste Stripe MRR and Plaid cash balances into the model, reformat everything into a slide template that breaks every time someone changes a font, and then the CFO asks you to recut gross margin by product line the night before the board meeting. The exec brief — the one-page or two-page narrative that should accompany the numbers — gets written in thirty minutes at midnight, usually by whoever is least exhausted. It never reflects the full story the numbers are telling because nobody had time to actually read them.

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Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Small Finance Teams3 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A Starch app that pulls your NetSuite or QuickBooks close data, Stripe revenue, and Plaid cash balances on a schedule and drafts a structured exec brief narrative — key variances, cash position, and forward-looking commentary — ready for CFO review each month-end

A Presentation Agent workflow that turns that narrative into a polished board-ready slide deck in minutes, not days, with financials already embedded

An Email Agent that routes the draft brief to the right stakeholders, tracks who has reviewed it, and follows up automatically so sign-off doesn't fall through the cracks during close 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

Investor Reporting Presentation Agent

Data sources & config

Starch connects directly to QuickBooks and NetSuite via scheduled sync — entity-level data including invoices, bills, vendor payments, and journal entries refreshes automatically and lives in Starch's database. Stripe charges, subscriptions, and payouts sync on the same schedule. Plaid syncs categorized transactions and balances. Gmail is connected via scheduled sync for the Email Agent review workflow. The Presentation Agent (currently in beta — request access to get notified when it launches) takes the narrative output and builds the deck.

Prompts to copy

Pull last month's P&L from QuickBooks and Stripe MRR data. Identify the three largest revenue and expense variances versus the prior month. Write a two-page exec brief with a cash position summary, a gross margin section broken out by product line if available from QuickBooks, and a 30-day forward outlook based on Stripe subscription trends.

Take this exec brief draft and build a 12-slide board update deck. Slide 1: title and date. Slides 2-4: financial summary with the key variance callouts as visual highlights. Slide 5: cash runway chart. Slides 6-7: revenue by product line. Slides 8-9: headcount and burn. Slide 10: 90-day priorities. Slides 11-12: appendix with full P&L and AR aging.

When the exec brief draft is ready, send it to the CFO and CEO for review. If either hasn't responded in 24 hours, send a follow-up reminder. Flag any reply that includes a question or edit request so I can action it before the board meeting.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect QuickBooks or NetSuite via Starch's scheduled sync. Starch pulls invoices, bills, journal entries, and vendor payments automatically — you don't run an export or touch a spreadsheet.

2 Connect Stripe via Starch's scheduled sync. Charges, subscriptions, and payout data are available in Starch as soon as the sync runs, giving you MRR, churn, and net revenue without a manual download.

3 Connect Plaid via Starch's scheduled sync so your cash balances and categorized bank transactions are always current inside Starch.

4 Open the Investor Reporting starter app from the App Store as your baseline. Fork it and tell Starch: 'Add a gross margin by product line section using QuickBooks invoice line items, and replace the investor narrative section with a 300-word exec brief format — cash position, top three variances, and forward outlook.'

5 At month-end close, trigger the brief by telling Starch: 'Pull last month's actuals from QuickBooks and Stripe. Compare to the prior month. Write the exec brief.' Starch reads the synced data and drafts the narrative — you review, not rebuild.

6 If the CEO asks for a gross margin cut mid-close, tell Starch: 'Recut gross margin by product line using last month's QuickBooks revenue and COGS line items, and update the exec brief summary section.' That's a two-minute ask, not a two-hour re-pull.

7 Hand the narrative to Presentation Agent. Tell it: 'Build a 12-slide board update from this exec brief. Include a cash runway chart, revenue by product line bar chart, and a variance summary table.' Review the output and iterate on individual slides as needed.

8 Route the draft through Email Agent: 'Send this exec brief to [CFO] and [CEO] for review. Remind them in 24 hours if I haven't heard back. Flag any reply with an edit request.'

9 When edits come in, make changes to the Starch app's narrative output, re-export to Presentation Agent, and regenerate the affected slides. Because your source data is already synced, you're editing narrative logic — not re-pulling numbers.

10 Archive the final approved brief inside Starch so next quarter's author can reference last quarter's commentary format. Over time, Starch builds a library of your exec brief structure that makes each subsequent close faster.

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

March 2026 Month-End Close Brief

Sample numbers from a real run

Net Revenue (Stripe MRR)	412,000
COGS (QuickBooks)	147,000
Gross Margin	265,000
Operating Expenses (QuickBooks)	231,000
Net Operating Income	34,000
Cash Balance (Plaid)	1,820,000
AR Outstanding (QuickBooks)	88,000

It's March 31st and close isn't done yet, but the CFO needs a brief by noon for a pre-board call. In the old workflow, someone on the team would be exporting NetSuite journal entries into a Sheet, pasting Stripe numbers from a CSV, and writing a narrative from memory. Instead: Starch already has March's QuickBooks data synced — invoices, bills, and journal entries — plus Stripe's $412,000 in MRR and Plaid's $1.82M cash balance. You tell Starch: 'Write the March exec brief. Gross margin came in at 64.3% — flag that COGS jumped $18,000 month-over-month and explain it's the AWS infrastructure cost tied to the new product launch. Cash is $1.82M, down $140,000 from February; note the timing difference on two large AR items totaling $88,000 that are expected to clear in the first week of April. MRR grew 6% month-over-month. Keep it to two pages.' Starch drafts the narrative in under a minute. You spend fifteen minutes editing tone and adding the forward-looking commentary on Q2 pipeline. The Presentation Agent turns it into board slides. Email Agent sends the draft to the CFO at 11:47am. The CFO replies with two edits. You apply them, regenerate the affected slides, and have a clean final package to the board by 2pm. What used to take parts of three days took four hours — and most of that was judgment work, not data assembly.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Hours spent on exec brief and board pack prep per close cycle (target: under 4 hours vs. prior 2-3 days)

Gross margin by product line, month-over-month variance (tracked from QuickBooks COGS and Stripe revenue)

Cash runway in weeks, updated from Plaid balances and QuickBooks burn rate at each close

AR days outstanding, pulled from QuickBooks invoice aging

Time from close completion to CFO-approved brief delivery (same-day vs. next-day)

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Sheets + Google Slides manual workflow

Free and familiar, but every close requires manual data pulls from NetSuite/QuickBooks and Stripe, and the slide deck breaks the moment someone edits a table — Starch keeps the data live and the narrative generated from it, not pasted into it.

Notion AI for narrative drafting

Good for writing assistance, but Notion doesn't sync directly from QuickBooks, NetSuite, Stripe, or Plaid, so you're still copying numbers into the doc by hand before Notion AI can do anything with them.

Vena or Planful (FP&A platforms)

Purpose-built for finance teams and genuinely strong for budgeting and consolidation, but they're expensive for a three-person team, require significant implementation time, and don't generate the narrative exec brief or board slides — you're back to a manual writing step.

ChatGPT or Claude with copy-pasted data

Works for drafting narrative if you paste the numbers in yourself every time, but there's no live data connection, no scheduled sync from QuickBooks or Stripe, and no automation for routing the brief to stakeholders — you're just saving time on one step, not the workflow.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — investor reporting, presentation agent, 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 read QuickBooks report views like the P&L summary, or just raw transactions?

Honest answer: QuickBooks report views — the preformatted P&L, Transaction List by vendor, and Vendor Expense reports — are temporarily disabled while an upstream connector issue gets fixed. What syncs today is entity-level data: invoices, bills, vendor payments, journal entries, and balance sheet line items. For most exec brief use cases — variance analysis, gross margin cuts, cash reconciliation — the entity data is what you actually need, and Starch can aggregate it into the summary view you'd describe in natural language.

Our board deck is in Google Slides and the CFO has opinions about the template. Can Starch work with existing templates?

Presentation Agent (currently in beta — request access to be notified when it launches) exports to PowerPoint, PDF, or a shareable link. The narrative and data assembly workflow in Starch works regardless of your final deck format — you can use Starch to draft and structure everything, then paste the final numbers and copy into your existing Google Slides template if that's what the CFO requires.

We're on NetSuite, not QuickBooks. Does the sync work the same way?

Yes. Starch syncs directly from NetSuite — invoices, expenses, journal entries, balance sheets, and income statements. The exec brief workflow described here works the same way whether your ERP is NetSuite or QuickBooks; you'd just connect NetSuite in the setup step instead.

Is our financial data stored in Starch? Is that a security concern we need to clear with the CFO?

Scheduled-sync data — your QuickBooks entities, Stripe transactions, Plaid balances — is stored in Starch's database to power the apps and automations you build. Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today, which is worth knowing if your CFO or board has compliance requirements around where financial data lives. If that's a blocker, it's better to know upfront.

Can Starch pull in Ramp or Bill.com data for the brief, since that's where our AP approvals actually live?

Ramp and Bill.com are reachable from Starch's integration catalog of 3,000+ apps — the agent queries them live when your app runs. They're not scheduled-sync providers today, so the data isn't stored in Starch on a refresh cadence the way QuickBooks is, but for pulling AP approval status or expense summaries into a brief, a live query is usually sufficient.

What if the CEO asks for a metric mid-close that isn't in the standard brief template?

That's the use case Starch is built for. Tell it: 'Add a gross margin by product line table to this brief using last month's QuickBooks revenue and COGS line items, broken out by [product category].' As long as the data is in your connected sources, Starch builds the new section from your description. You don't reconfigure a template or call a consultant — you just describe what you need.