Internal Comms & Meetings

How to write an exec brief as Small Investor Relations Teams

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Small Investor Relations Teams3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Your quarterly LP letter is due Friday. You're copying commitment pacing numbers out of QuickBooks, checking cash balances in Plaid, cross-referencing a deal table in a Google Sheet your CFO last touched six weeks ago, and then spending two hours turning raw numbers into prose that sounds like you wrote it on purpose. The 'brief' your GP wants for Monday's LP call is a separate document, assembled the same way. Two people, five systems, zero automation. Institutional tools like Juniper Square assume an IR-ops analyst to maintain them. You don't have one.

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Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Small Investor Relations Teams3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live-data exec brief template that pulls QuickBooks and Stripe figures, formats them into LP-ready prose, and flags anything that moved more than 10% quarter-over-quarter — ready in minutes, not hours

A Starch app that ingests your investor contact CRM data and drafts individualized capital call or update communications, with the right commitment figures and pacing language per LP

A searchable archive of every exec brief, LP letter, and board update you've produced, so when an LP asks 'what did you say about the J-curve in Q3?' you can find the exact language in 30 seconds

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 Knowledge Management

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule — invoices, bills, payments, vendors, and journal entries refresh automatically. Starch syncs your Stripe charges, payouts, and subscription data on the same schedule. Your LP contact and commitment tracker data connects from Google Sheets via Starch's integration catalog, queried live when a brief or communication runs. DocSend or Intralinks data room access is handled through browser automation — no API needed. Notion syncs on a schedule to power the knowledge base archive.

Prompts to copy

Build me an exec brief generator for quarterly LP updates. Pull our QuickBooks invoices, payments, and journal entries plus Stripe subscription and payout data. For each quarter, produce a 400-word narrative covering: cash on hand, revenue vs. prior quarter, burn rate, and any line items that moved more than 15%. Format it like a letter from the GP — clear, no jargon, specific numbers.

Draft a capital call communication for each LP in our contact list. Pull their committed capital and called-to-date figures from our commitment tracker sheet. Write 150 words per LP, citing their specific pacing, the reason for this call, and the wire deadline. Use a formal but direct tone.

Set up a knowledge base that archives every exec brief and LP letter we produce. Auto-tag each document by quarter, fund vehicle, and LP segment. When I search 'J-curve Q2 2025,' return the exact paragraph we used.

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Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect QuickBooks to Starch (scheduled sync). Within the first sync, you'll have invoices, bills, payments, journal entries, and vendor data available as structured tables — no manual export.

2 Connect Stripe to Starch (scheduled sync). Charges, payouts, and subscription data join your QuickBooks figures in the same environment, so a single brief can reference both revenue recognition and cash receipts.

3 Connect your commitment tracker Google Sheet from Starch's integration catalog. This is your LP-level source of truth for committed capital, called amounts, and pacing — queried live each time you generate a communication.

4 Wire up Notion (scheduled sync) as your exec brief archive. Every brief produced gets saved there with quarter, fund, and LP-segment tags applied automatically.

5 Start from the Investor Reporting app in the Starch App Store. It's already built for Plaid, Stripe, QuickBooks, and NetSuite — fork it and strip it down to the fields your GP actually reads.

6 Tell Starch what your exec brief looks like: 'Four sections — cash position, revenue summary, burn vs. budget, and one-paragraph GP commentary. Pull from QuickBooks and Stripe. Flag any line that moved more than 15% quarter-over-quarter in bold.' Starch builds the template.

7 Run the brief generator for Q1. Review the flagged line items — Starch highlights the numbers that moved; you add the qualitative context your GP wants. Total editing time: 20 minutes instead of two hours.

8 Use the Email Triage app to manage the inbound LP questions that follow every quarterly send. It triages by actual importance, summarizes long threads, and drafts replies you can send in one click — useful when three LPs email within 24 hours of a letter drop.

9 For capital call communications, give Starch the LP list and the call amount: 'Draft a capital call notice for each LP in column A of our commitment sheet. Use their called-to-date figure from column D. Wire deadline is May 15. Keep it under 200 words, formal tone.' Starch generates one draft per LP.

10 Set up a browser automation to check each LP's DocSend access log weekly and Slack you if any LP who received the Q1 deck hasn't opened it after seven days. No DocSend API needed — Starch automates it through your browser.

11 Archive each completed brief to Notion via the scheduled sync. Tag it with the quarter and vehicle. Next time your GP asks 'how did we frame the distribution timeline last year,' you search once and find the exact paragraph.

12 Schedule the full brief-generation workflow to run the first Monday after quarter-close: pull QuickBooks and Stripe, generate the draft, flag the movers, post the draft to a shared Notion page for GP review. Your Monday morning brief arrives in your inbox, not on your to-do list.

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Worked example

Q1 2026 LP Exec Brief — March 31 close

Sample numbers from a real run

Cash on hand (Plaid/QuickBooks)	4,200,000
Stripe ARR (annualized Q1 receipts)	1,840,000
Operating burn — Q1	310,000
Capital called YTD (commitment tracker)	6,500,000
Remaining uncalled commitments	8,750,000

On March 31, Starch pulled the QuickBooks sync (invoices, payments, journal entries) and Stripe payout data automatically. The brief generator flagged one line immediately: operating burn jumped from $240k in Q4 2025 to $310k in Q1 2026 — a 29% move, well above the 15% threshold. That's the one number your GP needs to explain before the brief goes out. Everything else — $4.2M cash on hand, $1.84M annualized Stripe revenue, $6.5M called against $15.25M total commitments — was in the draft within four minutes of the workflow running. The GP added two sentences about the burn spike (new engineering hire, one-time legal cost). Total time from data pull to final brief in DocSend: 35 minutes. The prior quarter took most of a day.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

LP letter draft-to-approval cycle time (target: under 24 hours from quarter-close)

Capital called as % of total commitments, by LP segment

Quarterly burn variance vs. budget (flagged automatically when >10%)

Data room open rate per LP within 7 days of send

Time spent on exec brief production per quarter (baseline vs. with Starch)

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Juniper Square / Addepar

Purpose-built for fund IR, but costs $50k+ per year, assumes a dedicated IR-ops analyst to maintain, and produces institutional reports — not the GP-voice narrative your LPs actually read.

Manual QuickBooks export + Google Docs

Free and familiar, but every export is stale the moment you save it, and the brief-writing is fully manual — no flagging, no drafting, no archive.

ChatGPT with copy-paste

Fast for drafting prose, but you're still manually pulling numbers from five systems and the output isn't connected to live data — so any revision cycle restarts from scratch.

Notion AI alone

Good for archiving and search, but has no live connection to your financial data — it can't pull QuickBooks figures or Stripe payouts into a brief without manual input.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — investor reporting, founder inbox, knowledge management 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 connect to Juniper Square or Addepar?

Juniper Square and Addepar don't have open APIs that Starch currently syncs. If your fund portal has a web interface you can log into, Starch can automate it through browser automation — pulling data from screens the same way you would. For most small IR teams, the cleaner path is connecting QuickBooks, Stripe, and Plaid (all scheduled-sync providers) directly, and using those as the source of truth for brief generation.

Can Starch handle the QuickBooks P&L view I normally export?

Honest answer: QuickBooks report views — P&L, Transaction List, Vendor Expenses — are temporarily disabled while an upstream fix is in progress. Entity-level data syncs normally: invoices, bills, payments, vendors, journal entries, and journal entry line items. For most exec brief use cases, entity-level data is enough to reconstruct the numbers you care about. If you need the formatted P&L view specifically, that's a known gap right now.

We store LP contacts in a spreadsheet our CFO also edits. Will Starch overwrite anything?

No. Starch queries your Google Sheet live when a workflow runs — it reads the data to generate communications, but it doesn't write back to your sheet or modify anything. Your CFO's edits are safe. If you want Starch to maintain a separate, Starch-native LP contact database with richer fields, you can describe that and it will build one — but it won't touch the source sheet.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We have LPs who ask about data handling.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your LPs or compliance process requires a SOC 2 report before connecting financial data, that's a real limitation to weigh. It's on the roadmap. For teams where SOC 2 isn't a hard gate, Starch's data handling is consistent with standard SaaS security practices.

Can the exec brief pull from our LP portal like iLevel or the Q4 platform?

If your LP portal has a web interface, Starch can automate it through browser automation — log in, navigate to the data, extract the figures — without needing a formal API. This isn't a workaround; it's a first-class Starch pattern. It works for any portal you can currently access in a browser, iLevel and Q4 included.

We send different exec briefs to different LP tiers. Can Starch handle that?

Yes. When you set up the brief generator, describe the segmentation: 'For LPs with commitments over $5M, include the full cash flow table. For LPs under $5M, include the summary paragraph only.' Starch builds the branching logic into the app. If your LP tiers live in your commitment tracker sheet, the workflow can read the tier column and apply the right template automatically.