Automate finance workflows with Claude

Claude exists across many services, your phone, the web. There's a desktop app you can download for it, and there's a couple tabs up here. There's chat. There's code, and then there's Cowork. And so, you know, I've I've played around a lot with, like, coding and things like that, but have really started using Cowork a lot more in my day to day work. I prepared for my senior leadership team off-site, calculated some total taxes, analyzed some net income, and I summarized the SLT meeting after we're done to make sure I knew that I could put it in my notes. Right? So you can do all sorts of stuff here. Somebody talked about security. We at Postscript really like to be on the Teams plan because it has some of that security framework around it where our data is not being shared out outside of our, our environment. Has user level restrictions, and it's not used to train the model. And so I'm gonna pick Acme SaaS. This is a made up company. And there's some files already within this folder. It can read those files. It can write to this folder, and it can work on a computer. And so I I have a couple files in there called, actuals and budget. I'm just gonna have Claude go ahead and put together a BvA, so we can compare kinda what's been going on in the business. You know, this is something that finance teams do all the time. Some people use software. Some people build them from scratch in Excel or Google Sheets. But Claude does a great job of taking those together and building them out. And so you can kinda see as it's running here, it's running some different skills, like its Excel skill, its CSV skill. So I'm gonna show you it while it's working because it can take a couple minutes to work, especially in Cowork mode where it'll actually get it'll actually work through a lot of different things. And so this is what it built for me the first time I ran the prompt. You can see it's got a whole breakdown in the various P&L categories. It pulled all those data. You can see here, it's like it's just that same prompt, and so it didn't I didn't have to do anything extra to get there. I just gave it that one prompt and got this full output. It shows, like, you know, budget versus actuals, the dollar variance, the percent variance. I asked it to run for full year full year 2025. So it showed me all that data, and I can dig in different categories and see what's going on there.

And so what if I wanted to, like, share this with the team? Claude's got a function called Artifacts, which actually you can it builds it, like, something that you can then share with your team as long as everyone's on the same Teams plan. So it's another reason to to use Teams because you can then have effects in there. And Claude also works within Excel. And so you could do the same thing in Excel. If it had the data in there, you could use the same prompt. It might run a little bit faster. What I like with this is that I can go outside of Excel and build it into things like dashboards and artifacts, and even ask it, you know, kind of further questions like this.

Can you schedule to have this work be happen each month? And how would you do that? I I know that Claude has, like, recent functionality. I haven't used it myself. I wonder where you have. Yeah. I I have a daily Slack post that goes to our FP&A channel on Slack that basically summarizes what happened. We're a usage-based company. So it summarizes, like, how many messages got sent yesterday? What was deliverability? What was our revenue yesterday? How does that compare trailing seven days versus a year ago trailing seven days? So I can see, like, how things are directionally moving. And I've scheduled that and just runs every morning. It drafts it. So when I, like, wake up and log in on my computer, I can go to my FP&A channel and see the draft already sitting there, and I can just review it, make any tweaks I wanna make, and click enter. And so it's it's our daily digest.

If you use Rilla as your ERP, what's the benefit of building this analysis outside of Rilla using Cloth, ToucheBP? How do you balance build versus file? For me personally, I would never do this in in CoWork because we already have Rilla and LF. And so those are tools that we've used to already automate a lot of this process. And so I can actually use Claude for more interesting work. I actually output a BVA that we built using Rilla and and Aleph that we analyze every month and a full twenty four month trailing management accounts and had a conversation with it about, like, where should our growth strategy be? What are things that we should be thinking about? And in the customize menu here, you can see that there's actually a handful of different connectors you can add. So I have, like, I have Gamma for presentations. I have GitHub for when I wanna push code that I'm I wanna save. It connects with granola. So when I record my calls, I can, like, search the call transcripts. So there's, like, lots of ways that you can get in here. You can see I've got it connected here. I've also got this thing here where I basically built out the same mappings that I have in Aleph for Rilla so that when I ask questions to Claude about my Rilla data, it knows to use the same ways that I look at it in Aleph. So there's lots of ways you can customize it.

But what I have here is just like offer data, thinking about like a direct to consumer company that has subscriptions, smart home subscriptions, and it has across different regions and across different segments. So first of all, if I try to do something like that you know, Claude in the web or Claude chat, one of the things that you will realize very quickly is I actually cannot because I cannot upload files that are larger than thirty two megabytes. So if I wanted to do something like this in Claude chat, I would need to do something like this where I just broke down the data. I can say, can you help me create a cohort analysis, create an artifact where you can interact with data, apply filters and whatnot. And then what I get very quickly something that like, again, looks pretty good out of the box and I could keep refining and adjusting. But again, it's gonna be a pain to update these with new data. So what I'm gonna do instead is I'm gonna go and do these in code. It works the same way as code where you can tie it to a specific instance, a specific folder. So here I have a folder in my desktop that I called using Claude for finance. And then I can send something like, can you copy the cohort data from my files folder and come up with a cohort analysis? And then when I do that, the other thing that I did slightly different is I set this up in plan mode. What it's gonna do is it's gonna ask me a few questions before actually starting to work on it. So let me maybe jump a little bit ahead, show you some of what's already built and take it from there. And I think the part that's interesting about using plot code in the app versus doing in the terminal is that you get this very handy preview section. It works very similar to what Chris was showing with the artifacts in Claude Cowork, but now this is a full website that eventually can keep working and even like publish to a URL.