What if Claude could act almost like a finance expert inside your business? Not just answer questions, review a financial model, find hidden mistakes, analyze an annual report, calculate key ratios, and build a full 5-year Excel budget model for a bank loan. I tested all three, using real work from my consulting practice.
Test 1: Auditing a client's real-estate model
A real model I built for a client: 5 years monthly, 60+ columns, 150+ rows, revolver financing, everything formula-driven. I planted two mistakes: an accumulated payment that double-counts a building (overstating payments almost 2×), and an annual interest rate applied monthly without dividing by 12 (overstating interest ~12×).
Claude's audit report identified both, by exact row, plus secondary non-material inconsistencies that would only bite if the client changed assumptions. Reviewing a model like this manually takes a financial analyst hours, if not days.
Test 2: Financial analysis from an annual report
I handed Claude a company's annual report and one word: run my financial-analysis skill, a reusable instruction set that tells it exactly which variables to extract (some buried in annexes, not the statements), which ratios to calculate (liquidity, profitability, working capital, leverage, average salary) and which formulas to use, so results are consistent every time.
Then I asked it to fill my Excel template and compared against my own hand-built analysis. Nearly every number matched exactly. The two differences were both judgment calls, not errors: Claude included a related-party loan in leverage (I'd excluded it because banks don't care about parent-company debt) and included board members in the average salary (I'd excluded them to avoid inflating the figure). My skill hadn't specified either rule, a perfect illustration of why financial experts are still needed, and why guardrails in your skills matter.
Test 3: A 5-year model from a blank sheet
Finally: "You're an experienced CFO. Build a clean 5-year financial model for an SME buying €150K of equipment with a bank loan." One instruction is critical: always use formulas, never hard-coded values, hard-coding only for assumptions. Without it, chat-built models come back as dead numbers you can't test.
The result: an executive summary, KPI blocks, a properly structured P&L down to EBITDA and net profit, supporting schedules for revenue, costs, the loan and cash flow, built-in model checks, and fully dynamic. Change the loan to €200K or the rate to 10%, and everything recalculates: profit, charts, all of it. Exactly how I would have built it, in about five minutes instead of days. (The chart design needs work. It always does.)
The direction is clear
This doesn't replace a good CFO or analyst yet, someone still needs to understand what's going on and make the judgment calls. But the actual build is solved, and finance work becomes radically more accessible: no more blank Excel sheets, no waiting for your busy CFO to justify every decision with numbers.